Diagnosing people

I sometimes suspect when people are manic. It's like nothing else. There is a girl in highschool at the starbucks that I do all my work at and she is exactly the way I am when manic. I've always wanted to ask her but I'm not a doctor so yeah.

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Serious question: are you serious about that not being a doctor?

From my experience, we might be, say, a hundred times as sensitive to stuff like this than most doctors, without training. Many nurses are quite perceptive. But unless we show very stereotypical behaviour, I think many doctors won't see it. They might combine details, they are generally good at that—rationally, but they wouldn't intuitively know which set of details to look for. We may do so very intuitively, afterwards finding supporting evidence that might be as visible to doctors as it may be to anyone else.

I think computers could do a better job at diagnosing than many doctors.

Exactly! My doctor has told me he has no idea what it feels like to be manic because he's not bipolar. He bows the symptoms as words but he can't empathize. He's quite fascinated in them. I can kinda tell he's always wished he could experience a manic episode.

But I'm pretty sure the girl is manic. She's like 17 and she writes a lot and talks about everything at a mile a minute and she hits on every guy that works there and gets giggly and flirty with me. She's a nice girl but I'm gay and 25. Seeing as how I'm usually hypo manic or manic when I go to Starbucks to write and blog I have always wanted to chat her up but that might seem wierd because I'm older than her and stuff.

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I actually do quite the opposite. When I learn that someone IRL has been diagnosed, I tend to be skeptical. If they don't have overt, classical symptoms I have difficultly believing their diagnosis and play psychiatrist in my head thinking their actual therapist must be an idiot or over diagnosing patients.

I'd say that would generally be the right attitude. Things get complicated, however, because BP is most probably, underdiagnosed. That doesn't mean that all with the BP diagnosis are correctly diagnosed.

Reliability of diagnoses is not as good as those for (most) diseases. Compared to other mental disorders it might still be relatively good. Then again, symptoms can easily be induced by meds.

It would be safest to assume BP or SZ (or SZA) before assuming unipolar depression or ASD (maybe when psychotherapy alone fails, maybe after a short exposure to BP/SZ meds as diagnostic tool), respectively, I'd say.

ASD is most probably overdiagnosed.

All such diagnoses shouldn't be necessary, though: society should accommodate and thereby (allow us to) use our strengths (more) effectively. But maybe not. Maybe we are at our best, taking risks, struggling. I hope not. I don't mind the severity, but I do mind the very slow progress.

Maybe we can build a part of society that is like that, though.

Too many ifs and buts: it's a mess.