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From what this guy says (and wow, informative, balanced, good stuff) Big Pharma is only part of the problem. They're vultures on the sidelines, but they don't influence the devising of diagnoses in the first place.
I was shocked to hear that 80% of psychiatric diagnoses are made by PCP/GP's! And what he says about how quickly doctors will come to conclusions about diagnoses (I think he's including psychiatrists here).
The part that is most relevant to this forum, of course, was the issue of -his opinion- of the misuse of the Bipolar II diagnosis. I would have liked to hear more about adult bp in general (he called its diagnosis an 'epidemic' but doesn't elaborate), but they clearly wanted to cover a lot of different diagnoses, so this part was disappointing to me.
All he said about bipolar II is something about elevated mood (of a sort) being pathologized, as part of normal range of emotion, thus leading to over-diagnosis. That's really all we have to gone on on that matter.
There's no way to know how prevalent this is, but it makes me think of something that comes to my mind sometimes which is that 'fun' and 'happy' is not an illness, yet there's this fear that it might be (and where it gets complicated, is that it can 'become' something far worse, but how do you know if that's going to happen or not and how helpful is the doctor in helping you figure this out)?
But then, I think, the problem becomes, that psychiatrists (and PCP's I suppose) seem to often be useless as guides when it comes to parsing out moods, what's pathological, what's not. Many of us have such a hard time parsing out our own symptoms, I think we need more help from psychiatrists who, instead of staying silent for so long on diagnosis (or saying, 'it doesn't matter') which I read about here and elsewhere, and medicating people nonetheless, they have the obligation to help patients track their moods and parse out what may be pathological and what's not.
I personally think they often suck at it. I don't see why so many people have to struggle figuring out their moods on their own when they have a professional prescribing boatloads of medications. Do the doctors just not know themselves how to parse things out, or are they just in a hurry and have gotten into their heads (and there seems to be a fad about this nowadays) that 'it doesn't matter?'
I think one thing are the problems with the DSM, and another is how it's used by clinicians. The DSM is very limited in describing symptoms and clusters of symptoms, especially because of the wide varieties of peoples' experiences, so clinicians need to be helping patients more to figure out what's going on instead of taking a history and writing scripts.
I've never done a 'mood chart' myself, but I'm curious about -for those who have and discussed it with their doctors- how helpful and knowledgeable you felt the doctor was with this? Did they go over it all with you, did they ask you lots of questions, did they explain things to you?
In sum, my process of diagnosis was frustrating (though it's okay now) and I've seen this has been the case for many people here. What's up with these doctors, you think? Why aren't they more helpful with diagnosis and identifying episodes? Why are we so often left on our own with this, when our insurance companies are paying them hundreds of dollars per visit and they're prescribing very strong medications often with terrible side effects?
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