Being identified as “mentally ill” is a complicated social process that may be stigmatizing and socially problematic, as a mental illness diagnosis determines the criteria for what is considered normal. This has given rise to a number of anti-stigma campaigns designed to create awareness of the way stigmas affect people with mental health difficulties and to normalize those difficulties in society. One such campaign is the “diagnosis-free zone”, which declares that those with mental health difficulties should not be categorized on the basis of their diagnosis; rather, they should be encountered as full individuals. In this paper, we investigate how mental health difficulties are discussed in Clubhouse communities, which adhere to the “diagnosis free zone” programme. The findings are based on conversation analysis of 29 video-recorded rehabilitation group meetings, in one Finnish Clubhouse, intended to advance clients' return to the labour market. The analysis demonstrated that members referred to their mental health difficulties to explain the misfortunes in their lives, especially interruptions and stoppages in their careers. By contrast, staff members disattended members’ explanations and normalized their situations as typical of all humans and thus unrelated to their mental health difficulties as such. In this way, the discussion of mental health difficulties at the Clubhouse meetings was implicitly discouraged. We propose that the standards of normality expected of a person not suffering from a mental health difficulty may well be different from the expectations levelled at participants with a history of mental problems. Therefore, instead of considering cultural expectations of normality to be a unified domain, effective anti-stigma work might sometimes benefit from referring to mental-health diagnoses as a means of explicitly tailoring expectations of normality.

被认定为“精神病患者”是一个复杂的社会过程，可能会带来污名和社会问题，因为精神疾病的诊断决定了正常情况的标准。这引发了一系列反污名运动，旨在提高人们对污名影响心理健康困难人士的认识，并使这些困难在社会中正常化。其中一项运动是“无诊断区”，它宣布不应根据诊断对有心理健康问题的人进行分类；相反，他们应该作为完整的个体来面对。在本文中，我们调查了遵守“无诊断区”计划的会所社区如何讨论心理健康困难。调查结果基于对芬兰会所中 29 次录制的康复小组会议的对话分析，旨在促进客户重返劳动力市场。分析表明，成员提到他们的心理健康困难来解释他们生活中的不幸，尤其是他们职业生涯中的中断和停工。相比之下，工作人员不理会成员的解释，并将他们的情况正常化为所有人类的典型情况，因此与他们的心理健康问题无关。这样，在会所会议上讨论心理健康困难就被含蓄地劝阻了。我们提出，对一个没有精神健康问题的人所期望的正常标准很可能不同于对有精神问题史的参与者的期望。因此，与其将正常的文化期望视为一个统一的领域，有效的反污名化工作有时可能会受益于将心理健康诊断作为明确调整正常期望的一种手段。