An extraordinary thing happened recently, when I flew across the country. Or, more accurately, one extraordinary thing started to happen, then didn’t, and another extraordinary thing did.

At the time I was doing talks and answering questions about psychiatric diagnosis, including the way mental health practitioners once considered conditions like depression, anxiety, and even psychosis likely to be temporary.

A shift to long-term thinking happened toward the end of the last century. In the late 1960s, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) used to diagnose psychiatric distress in this country went from using the label “reaction” to the label “disorder.” A “depressive reaction” became a “disorder,” and “temporary” hardened into “permanent.”

And gradually, with that shift, came the concept of disease “management,” generally defined as a lifetime of medication, rather........

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