Diagnosis Is a Human Construction Not a Discovery
Most psychiatric and psychological diagnoses are not biological entities waiting to be found in the brain. They are categories we construct to make sense of behavioural regularities. Brains do not have clear “signatures” for depression, anxiety, trauma, ADHD, or PTSD. There is no single circuit or region that defines them.
Diagnoses are inferences, categories we construct to make sense of behavioural regularities. There are no fingerprints in the brain for mental disorders. They are false inferences, categories invented by humans for convenience in western medicine.
What we call “symptoms” as problems, are really the brain’s predictions under metabolic constraint, as uncertainty. The same brain network that regulates your body also creates your actions, feelings, and thoughts.
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett.
So, diagnosis is an act of concept creation, not detection. It is a way of grouping experiences that seem similar, but every brain constructs those states differently depending on energy, context, and prediction history.
2. Diagnosis = Predictive Labelling
According to the predictive model: the brain constantly guesses at the causes of sensations. When clinicians diagnose, they are doing the same thing at a social level, predicting what someone’s sensations and actions mean based on past examples, then giving their prediction a name, based on a pre-determined differential display and medical narrative for an insurance policy.
It is not discovery; it is prediction. Diagnosis is a collective guess at meaning, built from medical language, history, and culture. This means two people can have the same label (e.g.,ADHD) but metabolically and neurologically be doing remarkably different things to manage uncertainty.
3. What Diagnosis Reflects: Energy and Meaning, Not Disorder
When the allostatic body tracker is depleted, sleep, nutrition, movement, hydration, attention or social regulation, the brain’s prediction spotlight narrows. Those narrowed predictions manifest as westernised “disorder” in behaviour, mood, and
focus. From this perspective, diagnosis is not showing pathology, it is naming a prediction of energy imbalance.
What we call “symptoms” are not problems, they are the brain’s predictions made under metabolic constraint. Repeated stress narrows the brain’s allostasis energy tracker, forcing it to predict from a state of uncertainty, not dysfunction.
When the body is depleted, prediction becomes conservative, it prepares for what it can afford, not what it prefers. So, what looks like distress is often energy inefficiency, not disorder. Your experience is your brain regulating the body it has, with the energy it can currently sustain.
4. Predicting Your World Interpretation
My extend idea into a social and metabolic model:
Diagnosis is not a discovery of damage. It is a snapshot of prediction efficiency under metabolic pressure.
- People diagnosed with ADHD, depression, or anxiety are not disordered.
They are predicting from high arousal uncertainty as past adversity and energy
depletion.
When regulation stabilises, through tracking hydration, sleep, nutrition, movement,
and attention, the brain’s predictions update, and the so-called “symptom” changes
meaning. - Diagnosis halts prediction at a single point in time. Regulation allows it to evolve.
Diagnosis can help describe predetermined outcome, but only regulation transforms. It is not that diagnoses are false, they are just incomplete, because they stop at the label instead of tracking the underlying energy state that produced it. The brain does not know diagnosis, it knows prediction.
It is not damaged, it is forecasting.
Summary.
Diagnoses are not biological unique markers in the brain; they are predictive groupings created to describe behavioural regularities that western medicine found useful to label. From a neuroscience perspective, the brain does not organise experience into fixed categories like “anxiety,” “depression,” “trauma” or “ADHD.” It predicts patterns of energy, arousal, and interoceptive change, then constructs emotional meaning to make sense of them. So, what we call a diagnosis is really a shortcut for repeated prediction error.
It reflects how the brain has been learning to regulate uncertainty, not a distinct brain circuit, gene, or neural signature. Western medicine named these clusters for convenience, but your brain is not following diagnostic logic, it is following metabolic efficiency. Diagnoses are human inventions, not biological neural entities.
They are the language we created to describe sensations, how people predict and regulate energy differently. What psychiatry calls a disorder, neuroscience recognises as a “prediction pattern,” the brain’s best attempt to stay metabolically efficient under uncertainty as past adversity.
There are no unique markers in the brain for mental illness, only predictive models waiting to be updated. Read this about the flight or fight myth here to make more connection with human construction. It is not what we are all led to believe!