When I work with teenagers who come in and declare generalizations such as “I have depression” or “I am suicidal,” I ask them if they remember Mr. Mackey’s voice from the animated TV show SouthPark. Then we make an impression of him together and say, “Labels are bad, mkay?”.

Labeling is what we can use to transform a generalized nominalization that is attached to the person’s identity. Labeling helps to disassociate the identity from the process that is ineffective.

Labeling is a simple linguistic move. First, we use a pattern interrupt. In the case of a teenager, we almost always choose SouthPark because it appears to have the strongest and most immediate effect on drawing them out of a depressive or suicidal state of mind.Then, we establish a conversational rule: we eliminate the usage of “I have depression,” which is impossible since you may laugh out loud and depression does not register in your mind in those moments, which means it disappears. If you had depression in the same way that you had a nail stuck in your big toe, changing your thoughts would not make it go away.

Lastly, we acknowledge the fact that the person can certainly feel the process of depression at certain times. In those moments, however, they ought to label it “this is depression” and point to it in the space around their body, where they can feel the emotion’s kinesthetic existence.

This simple linguistic maneuver changes the relationship between the inner self and the process of interpreting external stimuli. By pointing outside of the body, we treat the ineffective mental state as if it were a foreign obstacle and not a fixed internal “thing.”