> The confusing thing is I don't ift the criteria for Bipolar or Schizoaffective. My course is like Paranoid Schizophrenia one minute, Bipolar the next. My doc says wait and see but there should be enough information to say what's going on. Maybe it is JUST psychotic Bipolar.

whats going on is... that you are having certain symptoms that are making living your life problematic.

did you know that more people meet diagnostic criteria for the 'not otherwise specified' catch all category than meet criteria for any of the more specific diagnoses?

the first DSM had... three diagnoses, i believe. now the DSM has over 200. want to know the reason why? while the APA would have us conclude that we are getting more and more scientific the real reason is that there is increasing pressure on the APA to convey the appearance of more scientific. the DSM is a MAJOR money earner for the APA and DSM diagnosis is required for health insurance reimbursement in the US.

the reason we have such a weighty tome of classifications is because of political pressure and not because of the scientific evidence.

there is a move to try and get a dimensional rather than a categorical system off the ground. trouble is that the dimensionalists don't really have much of a consensus on what a dimensional system should look like. sigh. a dimensional system would reflect (what seems to be supported by the data) that it is a difference in DEGREE rather than KIND whether someone is mentally disordered or not. It is likewise a difference in DEGREE rather than KIND whether someone has one condition rather than another.

its not like medicine where it matters whether you are diagnosed with a certain pathogen because the treatment for it is specific to the kind of pathogen.

people like the little boxes...

seems to me that what this amounts to is...

whether you are likely to recover or not.

if 99.999% of people with your diagnosis don't recover then who cares so long as you are that 00.001%. trouble is that when people tell you you are unlikely to recover that tends to make it so...

i don't see why it matters what your diagnosis is...

what difference does it make?