The message is one of inferiority. The person so labelled, as well as others, will overgeneralize from the label - the label ends up doing more harm than what ever problems the person might originally have actually had. The outcome, critics continue, is that mental illness becomes associated with stigma. To be diagnosed is to be labelled. That label has a lot of stigma attached to it.
People misunderstand it.
What critics claim is that the shift from the medical model to the biopsychosocial model really made no fundamental change in orientation. The basic assumptions are changed. The question is no longer what is wrong with the person, but what are the strengths of this person and how can they be used. From this perspective, we would approach the schizophrenic person, for example, in a very different manner than we did in the other models. Such a biopsychosocial is really a call for interdisciplinary cooperation in the study of psychopathology, a cooperation that has not historically been a reality.