I think this is one of those very touchy subjects because so many people now have a lot of mental health struggles. Obviously what the author did isn't going to work for every single person. But I think there are people who would benefit from not overly-identifying with their diagnoses and looking for alternatives.
The reality is we live in a world that is practically optimized to cause mental illness. People are isolated from their communities, we work too many hours indoors on computers, and there is a general sense that life has no meaning. This is, of course, my sense of living in highly educated, urban areas. I can't speak for smaller towns and rural areas, which I assume have other challenges.
Identity and Mental Health Labels
I suspect there are quite a lot of people who believe themselves somehow less than or damaged due to mental health labels. Behaviors deemed troublesome seem to often be attributed to innate disorders, malfunctions in their body, which can only be tamped down by medication, but never fully addressed.
I wonder at the effect of giving a person these mental health labels on their identify, sense of self, and agency. It seems it would be negative, usually, and erode their agency and confidence.
My belief is that many people who struggle with mental health challenges have experienced difficult situations that they need help working through and recovering from. But that may be a very long, intense road (which implies expensive). We then end up in a situation where the case is pathologized instead and symptoms simply treated rather than the root causes addressed.
The difficulty here is that a person likely must be a strong advocate for themselves to find a good mental health care provider who can properly help them and as well as to access the resources to do so. A person who is struggling is likely not in a good position to do this.
I’m pessimistic that a true solution can be found here at scale in the near future. The availability of high quality mental health support needed by many people cannot be materialized. It requires immense, highly trained, human labor. I suspect for the near future, there will be many people like the author who are given mental health labels and prescriptions with no hope for recovery, because the capacity to truly help and support them is not there.