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Originally Posted by amandalouise
I know someone who was told by people in an online forum like this that yes they had DID..reason they heard voices and seemed to switch into alternate personalities..that person is now dead. he died of cancer of the brain.
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Way to use an extreme to define a norm. By the definition of extremes, these are outliers.
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I know someone who self diagnosed their self as having bipolar disorder. their reasoning...they went through highs and lows and what appeared to be hypo mania. turned out their problem was normal stage of life called peri menopause / menopause.
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What harm did this diagnosis do?
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I know someone who self diagnosed their self with schizophrenia, turned out they were just going through the normal process of pregnancy /anemia/ which was causing them to have hallucinations/delusions.
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So they were pregnant and didn't tell their doctor about hallucinations/delusions? At that point, it's not self-diagnosis's fault. When you're pregnant, you tell your doctor EVERYTHING because it's ALL relevant. Also, did this do harm to the baby? Anemia is quite common in pregnancy because the baby takes the iron from the pregnant person. If untreated with iron supplements, iron levels will go back to normal after birth.
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I know someone who believed their self to have DID because their vision kept changing, their moods changed, heard voices, had trouble with memory, lost time, ...turned out they had diabetes.
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Extreme to define a norm. Also this person had a very atypical case of diabetes, or they had physical symptoms they didn't think were related. I mean it's atypical anyway because hearing voices doesn't even appear on diabetes symptoms lists. At any rate, not paying attention to all the symptoms and diagnosing based on the symptoms you deem relevant is something that doctors deal with too. They misdiagnose too. All. The. Time.
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I have at times assumed something was part of my mental disorders only to find out it was something different..Multiple Sclerosis. sometimes I would think something was a mental or physical problem and it turned out to be stress or sleep deprivation (lack of sleep) or not eating correctly for my body's needs.
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This could have been written by my mother. Except she WAS diagnosed with depression only to be RE diagnosed with MS. That thing I just said about doctors misdiagnosing........
My personal position is there's nothing wrong with self-diagnosis. You cannot receive treatment through self-diagnosis and self-medication is a very different issue. Research is key, but pretty much everyone I know who has self-diagnosed has researched and researched and researched. At the end of the day, it leaves people feeling less alone, more understood, and less scared. And that's really what we should hope for people.
No one has ever been able to give me a reason why self-diagonsis is wrong. Just outlier stories of people who missed symptoms and who misdiagnosed themselves. Usually, these stories are presented to me by people who think that doctors do no wrong. Who have not seen their family members and their friends misdiagnosed and thrown under the bus by the medical community, who have not themselves been thrown under the bus by the medical community time and time again.
I'll end here with a story. This isn't so much self-diagnosis as it is unqualified diagnosis.. but from the time I learned what bipolar was... I was about 10. I diagnosed my father with it. He had been officially diagnosed with major depression, but I knew that wasn't the whole story. I saw him in mania. I knew what that meant. I even approached him about it, and I knew he had already heard that before due to his reactions. But he didn't want to face the truth, I guess. He got addicted to drugs chasing the mania and alcohol to try and forget the mania while in his depressed states. Last year, he finally brought these thoughts to his therapist/psychiatrist while detoxing from meth. How much pain would my family be spared if my dad listened to 10 year old me's diagnosis?