What's in a Name? Psychiatric Concept Creep and the Moral Legibility of Student Suffering within the Canadian University Context

This article explores how students experiencing mental unwellness negotiate psychiatric constructs of mental health to make their suffering morally legible within the North American University context. I argue while the psychiatric construct remains pervasive, students are ambivalent toward it as a metaphor for their distress. Students engage in bottom-up psychiatrization pragmatically to navigate relational contexts when appropriate for them, while recognizing that the impacts of top-down psychiatrization can limit institutional moral care obligations, constraining their authority to communicate their subjective experiences authentically outside psychiatric idioms. In essence, psychiatric labeling is constraining, but students often exert agency by refusing a psychiatric master status while still recognizing their need to use psychiatric labels to allow their suffering to be seen and addressed within the current cultural-historical moment of psychiatrization.