Does diagnosis matter?

If you don't want any medication to help then no it doesn't matters.

If you want meds to help then yes it matters.

Does this work the other way around, as in can you diagnose someone based on their reaction to medications? Mood stabilizers have never really done anything for me and antipsychotics have, does that mean my new diagnosis is right and I have schizophrenia and not bipolar like I've been diagnosed with for the past 6 years?

Getting diagnosed with schizoaffective instead of bipolar led me to clozapine, which has been a miracle drug for me. My psychotic symptoms have completely cleared up, leaving me with subclinical hypomania and depression for short periods of time only.

That's honestly hard to diagnosed because of meds. I'm BP1 and the meds basically just keeps me from having anxiety LOL, buspar. I'm also on mood stabilizers and they might as well be a placebo. Bipolar are also treated with antipsychotics medications. For some it helps with the symptoms of a manic episode, where you start hallucinating, severe paranoia, delusions when in a full blown episode. My mood stabilizer I guess helps but i think it more me forcing myself to keep it together. In my mind it's a constant battle when I'm annoyed or irritated.

It's close to bipolar but have differences such as schizophrenia has disorganized thinking where as being bipolar I want to do everything and want and demand order. I don't hallucinate only after I've gone without sleep but that's normal because after not sleeping you go into psychosis and see ****. Also another difference is bipolar can show in children like myself. I don't know what it is to feel any different. I'm just the same person I've been all my life. Schizophrenia usually shows up from late teens to 30 years old.

This might sound odd to you but I feel like a God sometimes because I feel like I own it. Like I'm the boss of everything. BP2 I think has a lesser feeling of this plus more depression and has been misdiagnosed a lot when it's just a depression disorder.

Back to the disorganized thinking of schizophrenic behavior, if this occurs they need to be taken care of since they're not able to. Even in my full blow episodes I'm still very intelligent which is dangerous because I can go buy a car or drive 185mph and feel in total control.

Hope I was able to give you insight. If I was you I'd switch pdocs because that's 2 different diagnosis, we arent talking BP1 and change it to BP2 or BP2 to depression disorder.

What type of testing did they do on to come up with schizophrenia? Did they do lab testing or imaging? That's usually required but the mental health field isnt really regulated and they can diagnose you just from telling them a bunch of ********

yeah...mental health is subjective...on a good day. that's when they're not straight up lying and defrauding people.

'From my perspective, does the diagnosis matter'?

It does. Now forget about ever being told you were Schizoaffective bipolar type.

Antipsychotics seems to be adminisered for many different things. They gave it to me in hospital once, and I wasn't psychotic, but apparently in smaller dosages it could be used to calm me down or smth.. I'm still not sure exactly why they gave it to me. I don't know if it helped either.. lol

The diagnosis gives you closure, confirmation of an illness, not a personality defect.
But that's about as far as it matters.

I don't want to be put in a pigeon hole, frozen in time in the minds of others, forever labelled. Two people, same diagnosis, will present in very different ways. I don't want to be treated as anyone else, I am an individual.

I am feeling lately like diagnosis matters more to me than I originally thought. On the one hand, it is just a label and I know labels aren't as important as the details of our individual experiences. However, a diagnosis provides me with an answer as to why my brain malfunctioned the way it did. A diagnosis gives me an idea of what to expect going forward and helps me to know what signs and symptoms to look for. My doctors recently took away my diagnosis and I'm feeling a little lost. I'm not sure what to expect and I don't know why or how my episode with psychosis got so out of control. Bipolar disorder gave me answers and a path to follow to reduce the likelihood of relapsing. Now I feel like I am flying blind. I'd be grateful if what I have is just a one and done episode or something that recurs infrequently, but without a diagnosis I just have to wait and see what happens. I know this is technically true for anyone as we are all different, but I feel like I'm missing something. My diagnosis sort of helped me to make peace with how out of control I was. Justified isn't really the right word, but it helped me realize it wasn't all my fault and I could blame the disease for putting me in a position to behave the way I did. Now I don't know what to think.

Underdevelopment nailed it. I need the closure and confirmation that something caused the horror and trauma I experienced. Treating myself as if I do have bipolar disorder is working, so I can at least say CBT and antipsychotics help whatever I do have going on. That is a relief.