This is a fact. My girlfriend is going to school at northwestern to be a counselor and she said they only get paid if they diagnose a client. So basically if you see a counselor you’re gonna get diagnosed with something.

Idk, seems off to me.

bpd is borderline personality disorder ... bipolar affective disorder is BPAD

It's not. You are giving them far too much faith and attributing what you wanted to hear from them. I've heard that from every single uncle lost to Fox News and Limbaugh and the hosts themselves for years. It isn't that nuanced, though everyone takes different things from texts.

I’m on cymbalta and vyvanse now, and I’m doing pretty well. I found an amazing doctor on circle medical. Getting actual therapy is my next step. I’m pretty sure i have cptsd from my mom too.

Congrats on getting out. It takes a lot to take care of yourself and advocate for yourself the way you are.

Yep, that's another potential diagnosis that's been considered for me. And it's not clear which symptoms are PTSD and which ones are different illnesses.

And then you throw in the confusion of hormonal birth control.

Buproprion has worked really well for me for a while, which seems like a good indication that it's an adhd/depression combination.

My mother was abusive. She is also a doctor, and when teenage me started fighting back, she had me put on mood stabilizers for bipolar. I didn't take them for long, but when I left home that question always lingered for me - am I dealing with trauma or mental illness? Both? Which illness? My ups and downs are extreme and self-destructive.

I did talk therapy for a long time and despite improvements, it wasn't fixing things in a significant way. I was resistant to medication for lots of reasons. Having a hard time trusting doctors, worrying about the effects of trying different medications, seeing my sister use adhd meds to support her anorexia. And also, being worried about the label.

But antidepressants have turned my life around. I can think straight again. I get up in the morning and I want to do things. I can focus and prioritize. Some days I wake up happy just because.

This was a very long-winded response that you did not ask for, but it's all to say: at this point, I don't care what they say I have. I'm just happy that the treatment works.

No such thing as a true control sample when it comes to human beings, at least for the conditions wrapped up under the “mental health” umbrella.

Absolutely. But it's a lot harder on my body to deal with where I am without medication -- random bouts of insomnia, constant anxiety, bouts of depression where I don't exercise or eat right, and self-destructive patterns of drug use.

I do feel that I've spent enough time on each different med before stopping. The side effects in the first two weeks were enough to know that some weren't right for me.

And what I'm on now worked great on the lowest dose for a few months, then seemed less effective, so the dose was increased, and now it helps again. So I've been on the same medication for several months now.

Adhd in women is commonly misdiagnosed as bpd. Maybe read about inattentive type adhd.

A lot of women dont find the correct treatment until they treat their undiagnosed adhd.

I got diagnosed with autism as an adult and I second your experience. It has been super-helpful to know what is going on. Especially since I am very repressed and an internalizer, so I spent my life struggling in silence, which sometimes made me gaslight myself about whether I even struggle at all.

I personally don't disclose to people who I assume wouldn't understand, but I don't feel ashamed by the label itself at all. I do feel ashamed by some of my autistic personality traits because of the negative feedback I got, but that happened BEFORE anyone, myself including, knew I was autistic. Because the stigma isn't (just) about the label, it is about the manifestations of the differences/struggles I inevitably do present and worked so hard to keep under the lid.

Personally I would feel so patronized for not getting the truth because my diagnostician decided I couldn't handle it. A friend got diagnosed with borderline personality disorder recently, or so she thought - turns out her former psychiatrist had already diagnosed or strongly suspected, without informing her. She scrutinized her after receiving the diagnosis from the new person, found out that former provider had known all along, was understandably upset and only now got to access specialized group therapy, which it turns out, helps her tremendously - more than any other form of treatment she had received. Because these labels make you eligible for more targeted support and allow you to connect with people in similar situations. And especially finding community has proven helpful in almost all documented cases.

me and my mam used to laugh about my grandmothers neuroses! yeah, we’re not laughing now, but it’s still funny ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

this made me laugh this morning too

More specifically, religion with some degree of double blind randomized control trial.

Isn’t it stressful in your body and mind to keep on trying new medications over and over? You have to ween off the old ones before trying the news ones without knowing if you spent enough time on them before stopping.

In a way you’re going into a Buddhist philosophy here. The trauma of everyday life, resulting in dukkha, or suffering. Some folks seems like they tolerate the intolerable better than others for various reasons, others seem to have been more traumatized. For some it seems to have possibly made changes to their brain as a result. Diagnosing, treating, and prescribing will probably remain imperfect due to the highly individual and neural-plastic nature of the brain—people are just too unique. We seem to be moving more and more to seeing qualities as on continuums. One end of the continuum it’s a personality trait or character aspect, too far on the other end of a continuum, and it becomes pathological or a symptom if it interferes with functioning. I think it will keep trending this way.

UK as well, no longer a patient having been discharged despite needing help. How does that work with how limited to non-existent resources are, are you a private practitioner? What about the patients for whom there is a diagnosis that would be a clearer fit?

I have OCD, and finding out about it, while studying psychology, was an entirely positive experience, suddenly I had an explanation of what was going on with my mental rituals, and there were strategies to cope. My first panic attack, before my mum explained what it was and that she had them too, was an utterly petrifying experience as well. The stigma comes from prejudiced and ignorant people, not the patient themselves (I know I'm not alone in finding getting a diagnosis hugely positive), and the labels can be a way to educate them. The prejudiced also tend to think all mental illnesses are the same, and have an image of violent paranoid schizophrenia. I don't think patients benefit from being lumped together like that.

Hi, I know. I'm so grateful for not being yoked to that system.

! GREAT INSIGHT!

The DSM-V, metaphorically speaking IS something of a “recipe book” for components to an individual’s initial plastic, multivariate psychological construction.

As a patient makes progress to wellness, different aspects may be revealed and treated accordingly.

I see “mental health” as more of a religion, or a cult, than a true scientific or medical field. There’s a distinct lack of falsifiable claims for it to meet a certain threshold of objectivity.

That's definitely not a new concept

Victim mentality, macdonald mentality, ready made, easy solution mentality loves diagnosis labels. They are useful but they are a tool for clinicians people think the DSM 5 is a recipe book everyone can use

Lets remember that forcing a diagnostic label in mental healt is firstly a requirement from the US insurance system

Augustine’s aesthetic principle reminds us that we need the bad to see the good - in other words, suffering only exists because we have something else to compare it to, this being lesser suffering or happiness - this means that by removing all the suffering in the world you would be removing all the happiness in the world (also a classic political/philosophical debate, what is more important suffering or freedom)

It’s not that the demon or machine takes the ‘brain’ out of their body. He distrusts his sense experience because he speculates that his body could be controlled by a ‘malicious demon’ - the machine reference was actually something added on later by Gilbert Ryle who in his work ‘the concept of the mind’ (1949) critiqued Descartes notion of the mind body and soul problem, he called it the ‘ghost in the machine’ model to describe Descartes, the body being the machine. Furthermore, it’s not the brain he is concerned with it’s the soul because the brain is a material thing that he is a aware of, he even argues that the soul interacts with the body through the pineal gland of the brain

You brave individual for trying to read the tractates

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While the point on psychology is nice and fine, the points made in terms of medication are pretty biased and potentially damaging.