Humanity is ever adapting and always moving forward in a (hopefully) progressive direction.
That said, we have, on a larger scale, always had certain troubles with categorizing groups of other people. I, myself, am right now assuming the rest of the class is born and raised North American. Long ago, Europe went to war after war with Muslims and other neighboring countries for believing in an alternate take on the same God over the course of nearly 500 years. Slavery against blacks was a perfectly legal practice in America and other countries for far too long. Homosexuality was considered a mental illness for years and AIDS was believed to be an entirely homosexual disease until enough straight people started contracting it. It seems even now our country is still wrought with fear and hate over the 9/11 attacks. We've closed off our country to refugees fleeing those same terrorists and even made a mess of our airports out of that fear.
In all of these situations, the group with more power assumed that there was something innately wrong or incorrect about the other group. Of course, that isn't to say that we haven't gotten any better. Like I said in the beginning, we're always improving. It seems like homophobia will always exist, but at least it isn't a mental illness anymore, just like trying to escape slavery isn't a mental illness anymore (Maddux, WInstead, p. 8). If our track record has anything to say, there is no doubt in my mind that some group in our classification system is being marginalized or hurt by the people in charge and it'll take time to find and rectify these issues.
That isn't to say that we should stop using the DSM altogether. I agree with the concept of having a unified nomenclature that turns psychopathology into a harder science, and I do believe that, as a whole, it is doing more help than harm. We just always need to be on the lookout for how we think about or consider others who are different from ourselves. Somebody with a disability may need more assistance than the average person, or perhaps they may want to be treated just like everyone else. The same can go for mental illness. You can categorize and subcategorize everyone until the cows come home, but ultimately, we're all just human beings, just like everyone else.
Sorry this got so long! What do you guys think? Have you seen or experienced any examples of labeling gone wrong?