Hey. I remember dx confusion. I've been diagnosed with: brief adjustment disorder, depressive episode, major depressive episode, borderline personality disorder, avoidant personality disorder, generalised anxiety disorder, schizoaffective disorder, brief psychotic episode, dissociative identity disorder, and a variety of different substance abuses...

Sheesh. will the real dx please stand up??????

The interesting thing about diagnostic categories is that... More people meet criteria for 'not otherwise specified' diagnoses than the criteria for particular kinds of disorder. I also think that if you take the class of people who meet criteria for one diagnosis... The majority of people in that class will meet criteria (and have concurrent diagnoses) for about... 4 or 5 conditions.

Sometimes this happens because there is an overlap of symptoms in different disorders.

- Psychotic features (during time of stress) is a symptom of borderline personality disorder, for example. (incl hearing voices)
- Intense moods (lasting from several hours to a couple of days) is also a symptom of borderline personality disorder.
- Self injury is a hallmark of BPD.

So the psychotic and mood symptoms can be explained most economically via borderline personality disorder.

OCD is a fairly common concurrent dx with BPD.

Regarding treatment... Medications tend to work on symptoms rather than diagnoses (diagnoses are best thought of as clusters of symptoms). It doesn't matter so much what your dx is so long as they have a view of the symptoms they are attempting to treat. Also... Different people (with the same symptoms) tend to respond differently to the same medication so to a very large extent medication is a trial and error process...

Are you in therapy at all? That could help with managing stress (to help with the psychotic symptoms) managing OCD symptoms, gaining more control over intensity of mood, tolerating distress etc.