Why I cannot get a diagnosis.

If I grew up in a sane family, I would not have a mental illness. If my parents had communicated in a sane way with me as a child, I would have been diagnosed then. Communication is critical in getting help.

I have two significant others in my past that I now know could have proven that I was dissociative. All they had to do was to talk to a mental health professional about the communication that occurred.

When I put myself in the Charter Hospital in Plano, TX I met some women whose dissociative disorder exhibited just like mine. It is extremely hard to tell one personality from another. One woman had no memory of abuse but she had a positive diagnosis. She would go out and buy lots of clothes with a credit card which she and her husband could not afford. Then she would not remember doing it. So her Dad and her husband put her in the Charter.

A point: If you are traumatized between newborn and three, you very likely will not remember the trauma, but you can still develop a dissociative disorder.

My Mother admitted to me late in life that my Brother was very likely hurting me while I was in the crib. She said that I was a quiet baby usually, as apposed to my brother who had the cholic. She said she would be cooking or on the phone and I would start screaming. She would not bother to come see what was happening and would simply wait for me to stop. My brother was two to three years old at this time. I am positive that this was when he developed his obsession with hurting me and making me cry. Though-out my life I had night terrors, where I would dream someone was trying to get me but I could never see a face.

Most of the women that I met at Charter, whose symptoms exhibited like mine had loved ones who cared enough to get involved in their mental health treatment.

I, unfortunately, do not have any loved ones who care. My Mother and Brother decided when I was a toddler why I should be treated differently than my Brother. My Brother justified his abuse of me in his mind and my Mother reinforced this behavior by telling both of us that it is normal for older brothers to "pick-on" their younger brothers.

Sibling abuse in the same as spouse abuse psychologically.

I met women who were horribly abused as toddlers in the Charter. Even a layman could diagnose them. These are the people who have extreme differences in personalities and they are the self harmers.

Hello Michael: Thanks for sharing your perspective. I'll share a bit of my own history with you. I don't know what my diagnosis would be. Over the course of the past 18 or so years, through two hospitalizations following suicide attempts, none of the mental health professionals I've seen have ever offered a diagnosis. And each one seems to have had a little different perspective with regard to what's going on with me. (I'm an older person now. And it no longer really matters anyway.)

I was an only child. So I didn't have any siblings to abuse me. But I was a punching bag throughout pretty-much all of junior & senior high school. (Everyone knew what was happening. But no one cared, including my parents.) I was able to hold myself together psychologically, more-or-less, for the first 50 years of my life. It often wasn't pretty. But I was a master of denial. Where & when I grew up, any hint of mental illness was something shameful to be hidden at all cost. Then, at around the age of 50 I had a not-too-serious bout with cancer and I began to unravel. I've been slowly disassembling ever since.

My secret mental health problems began so early in life that I have no memory of how, or why they began. I only know that my very earliest memories involve things that relate to my secret mental health problems. It is all a gnarled ball of wire that will never be untwisted. I do recall my parents telling me that, when I was still an infant & being bottle fed, apparently there had been news reports of a number of infants who had been put in their cribs with bottles & who had suffocated as a result of having curdled milk block their airways. One evening, as I was later told, I was in my crib with a bottle, my parents heard me let out a short cry & then stop. They rushed in & found me not breathing. My father, as I was later told, picked me up by the legs, & hit me backwards against the wall which dislodged two balls of curdled milk from my nose. I've sometimes wondered if, in that moment, they perhaps both saved me & doomed me at the same time...

I moved far away from my parents at a still fairly young age & rarely went back, much to my mother's consternation, in particular. My parents have both been gone now for many years. They weren't around to witness my devolution into mental illness. I'm thankful for that. On the other hand, since I managed to hide my mental health struggles for so many years, I'm quite certain my parents both died thinking I was the most ungrateful SOB that ever walked the face of the earth. I don't know... maybe they were right.

It is extremely easy to traumatize a toddler. The first five years of life are critical in the development of the human brain and the personality.

Dr. Spock was telling women that a toddler did not develop a memory until the age of four or so. My Mom actually believed that. I remember her talking about it when I was young. She did not think that she had to worry about her toddlers' emotional and psychological welfare. She had absolutely no empathy for her toddlers' feelings and emotions. Dr. Spock was an idiot.

We need to start teaching good parenting skills to women and parents in general.

In my case it was more the emotional and psychological traumas that caused me to be dissociative and not the physical traumas.

i had trauma begin when i was born, but it was medical related and all necessary to save my life. it was a mix of daily procedures (mildly painful) but being handled by nurses/doctors every few hours a day for several months, painful procedures, noise, lights, etc. and then a near death experience at a few months old after surviving the first few months of life.

for maybe two or so years, things were ok, but then various traumas happened between 4 and 10 or 11 years old. the amount of things i remember seems like it couldn't really have happened, but it was a lot of one-time things with different people (kids my own age or an adult) and different types of things. there was a mix of s*xual abuse, verbal/psychological, unintentional emotional neglect, and witnessing harm to family members that caused my struggles. there are things i don't remember though, but i can 'feel' it.

i was highly anxious and fearful as a young child, but no one paid attention to it. i started struggling more at 11 inward when things slowly kind of started 'waking up' and more outward around 13 with self harm, severe depression, anxiety/panic, etc. i didn't know why though for a while until it started kind of coming back in bits and pieces.

i received an unofficial diagnosis of DID in 2003 and probably just last year officially after i finally was honest with the psychiatrist after so long. before that, the diagnosis was dysthymic disorder and then moved unofficially to borderline personality disorder at 16 then officially at 18. i don't believe i have it as a diagnosis anymore though as i don't meet the criteria.

it was really a matter of what i said to people and when, what my symptoms were, what they picked up and labeled, etc., so not a lot knew what the real issues were, and i wouldn't tell most of them...though i really thought a few times i had.

it is hard to both be honest and get a professional who believes you and hears you and is willing to look at things and try to help.

Most of the mental health professionals that I saw since 1992 did not know how to question me to find out the traumas that I went through. They did not communicate well enough. At that time I did not know enough myself.

I do not hate my Mother or Brother for abusing me. It was done out of ignorance and bad parenting skills.

Again it is extremely easy to traumatize a newborn to three year old child. Most parents do not even know they are traumatizing their toddlers.

This is an educational issue. I am mad at our religious groups for not helping with this issue.

heres a thought ....maybe instead of waiting for treatment providers to ask you the right questions to find out about the trauma you can tell them yourself...

one time I was very angry at my treatment provider I had then. they just were not diagnosing me right, they just didnt know how to ask me things, they just were this or that.....

I was placing the blame on not getting diagnosed right and not getting the right treatment solely on them.

one day I lost it during therapy. i told my therapist I didnt want to see her anymore, she just wasnt doing it right, she wasnt diagnosing me and wasnt treating me for my problems because she wasnt asking the right questions to find out...

she laughed.. yes she belly laughed ... then she said to me so its all my fault that you are being diagnosed wrong and on treatment plans that are not working... have you ever thought that

... you are the one with the problem so its your responsibility to tell me what is going on and what you need from me. its not my responsibility to think up questions and figure out if those questions are the right ones that will have you telling me about your problems.

....heres something to think about no matter what questions I ask they will be the wrong questions and the wrong way to ask questions if you do not want me to know something. only you can tell me what you want me to know.

if you want me to know what you need, why you are in treatment and about those trauma's you will tell me when you are ready. I can not read your mind and I can not guess which questions to ask that may or may not be the right questions.

boy was i angry for days, how dare she say those things to me. but then I had to go to my medical doctor for a physical problem. the doctor didnt ask me any questions just said hi havent seen you in a while. and I said yea Ive been very healthy but I have this headache, my chest hurts when I breath and Im coughing.... then he did his routine vitals and said to me you have pneumonia. I went how with the right diagnosis, the prescription for the right meds and thought wow how did he do that... answer because I told him what was going on. I didnt wait for him to ask the right questions, i didnt wait for him to read my mind...

I went back to my therapist and appologized. and said you are right... heres why I am coming here and this is what my problems are and this is what I need form you...Amazing I got the right diagnosis and on the right treatment plans.

my point maybe instead of waiting for your treatment providers to figure out what questions are the right ones to ask you that will uncover what you want them to know. you can tell them what you want them to know so that they can get you diagnosed and treated correctly.

From the first I told every psychologist and psychiatrist immediately that I had a dissociative disorder. That should have been all I needed to say.

Most of the mental health professionals in Florida would not even consider that diagnosis. It is how they are trained in the colleges down there. Not one of them referred me to a specialist.

I have two engineering degrees so when a mental health professional disrespects me it makes me extremely mad. (Well not at first, but now it does.) All I needed was one competent mental health professional who understood the long term mental health issues an adult lives with from childhood trauma. Since 1992 I have not found one.

My life fell apart after my Dad died and left my mentally ill Mother alone. My Mom and my Brother caused my mental health issues. So Mom was a major trigger for me. I love my Mom but I could not take care of her, financially or emotionally. My career was not going well.

Not really.I don't know of any mental health provider that is going to immediately start treating someone for a self diagnosed disorder without confirming it first themselves.

Maybe that's where you have been going wrong,by telling them what you have and expecting to be treated for it?

Maybe it would be better if you allowed them to do the diagnosing?I know I said it before,but I feel if you have a dissociative disorder a professional will recognize it eventually,maybe not in a time frame you would like,but eventually they would.

i've been through the ringer with diagnosis... and still havent hit the right one that i know of... gonna try to find out what my diagnosis is at next appointment...

just have to keep tryin to get the treatment that works for you... therapy is nice when its with the right person...

just because someone walks into a doctors office and says hey I have strep throat doesnt make it so. that strep throat can be anything from the flu, a cold, dehydration, allergies....

my point just because someone goes to a mental health treatment provider and says I have a dissociative disorder doesnt make it so. that person with dissociation problems can have PTSD (which includes dissociation problems) depression (which includes dissociation problems) schizophrenia type mental disorders (which includes dissociative like symptoms)...

in my location, usually when someone walks into a mental health treatment providers office and says I have a dissociative disorder and thats all I should have to tell you... thats actually a "symptom" (not diagnostic criteria but a symptom) of having factitious disorder imposed on self mental disorder. then they are treated for that mental disorder (focusing treatment on issues not diagnosis, focusing on stabilizing day to day living, any mood problems, and other existing problems for example if I remember right you are a veteran so most likely someone somewhere has diagnosed you with PTSD (which by the way does have dissociation problems)

if you want treatment providers to diagnose you, you have to ask for actual diagnostic testing. this is where you go to a psychiatrist and say Im here to find out if I have any mental disorders. here are my problems. then you explain what your problems are. (this is different then telling them that you have this or that mental disorder so they cant jump on well this person is researching and fitting their self in all kinds of crap whether its true or not by a treatment providers diagnosis process.)

example when I go through diagnostic evaluations I sit down and say I here for testing to find out what mental disorders if any that I may have, I have a problem with getting out of bed some days, some days I feel like I just want to find an isolated cabin in the woods and stay there for ever, I have a wife and three children, my job is this that and the other thing....

then .......based on what I have told the treatment provider.... that treatment provider asks questions to get more information/ details about my problems and some oral testing questions.

then they have me do some written and computerized tests.

some mental disorders require going to a medical doctor too.

then after all the tests have been scored including what information I supplied with the interview and therapy sessions the treatment provider tells me what my mental disorders are, I do not tell them what my mental disorders are, they tell me.

the way the american mental health system is you do not get referred to a specialist for dissociative disorders. you get a therapist and a psychiatrist and here in america all therapists and all psychiatrists have "knowledge" (which is different than their personal beliefs) of all american mental disorders that are in the DSM.

treatment for dissociative disorders is the same treatment you get for anxiety, depression, PTSD....grounding, how to handle your day to day stress and living, if you are a survivor of abuse, wars or what ever you talk about it. (you have to bring up the issues you want to work on in therapy, treatment providers are not mind readers, if you want to talk about your childhood and such then you have to tell them)

yes there are some treatment providers who work with dissociation problems. to see them just ask your treatment provider who in the mental health agency works with PTSD, Depression and dissociation. most likely they will tell you they work on all those things.

if you want to go inpatient like your other posts state there is the colin ross inpatient and out patient programs. you dont need a doctor or therapist to refer you to them you just contact these places and ask them if they have space available and if they are taking on new clients if so go to them. be sure to check with your insurance plan to make sure these specialized treatment programs like colin ross are on your insurance plan or that they accept your insurance plan.

Quote:
she laughed.. yes she belly laughed ... then she said to me so its all my fault that you are being diagnosed wrong and on treatment plans that are not working... have you ever thought that

... you are the one with the problem so its your responsibility to tell me what is going on and what you need from me. its not my responsibility to think up questions and figure out if those questions are the right ones that will have you telling me about your pro

If the mental health professionals were paying me $100.00 per hour I would take responsibility. I was trying to work. I needed them to be the professionals in mental health so that I could keep my mind on my job. If you were having an appendectomy would you take any responsibility for the surgery?


Quote: From CrispApple This has to do with the implication of me self-diagnosing. I am having a hard time copying her tread.

If mental health professionals have an ego problem, they should not have a license to treat other humans until they solve their own emotional problem.

You sound very angry, I'm sorry you have been shopping for a doctor to diagnose you with the label you want and haven't found one yet. You say you are at charter a place they specialize in this...why haven't they given you this diagnosis that you want? Perhaps the answer is that you don't have this diagnoses? Having a traumatic childhood doesn't mean you will develop this specific illness, yes your mom and brother were abusive and yes it greatly affected you and your mental health. But maybe you should be open to other illnesses and open to treating the symptoms instead of just a label?

I am not exactly sure what you mean by that statement,can you please explain?

If you mean they have an "ego problem" because they won't just accept a self diagnosis as fact and then treat the person for it,I don't see it that way at all.I think it would be very unethical for any professional to do that.I surely can't go to an eye dr and say hey,I have glaucoma and expect treatment for it without first being diagnosed,I can't see my GP and say hey I have strep throat and expect an antibiotic,and mental health is certainly no different,nor should it be.

It would be very unethical if someone went in and said hey I have schizophrenia,BPD,or any other illness and get treated for it without it being confirmed that it is indeed the correct illness,and dissociative disorders are no different.

I went to a dr and said I had back pain.He wanted to do a CT scan,and I was upset,I 'thought' I simply had a backache and didn't want to have one.In order to be treated though,I had to agree to the scan.It was kidney stones,and had I not let HIM diagnose me I wouldn't have received the right treatment and wouldn't have got better.

I'm just saying if you want a diagnosis,if you want treatment,why not let a professional decide if your diagnosis is correct?If you are right then you will finally receive what you have been seeking,which is the diagnosis and help you want.

i've been trying to figure out what wrong with myself for 6 years... going to doctors and everything... it takes time... they have told me before to try not to focus too much on the labels... labels wont explain our individual experience so much (which i cant help but focus on whats causing me problems so dont get me wrong) but try focus on the symptoms and treatment to make the symptoms better...

dissociative disorders seem to take time to get to... since other mental illness can involve dissociative experience... but not necisarily be dissociative disorder...

i totally understand your frustration though, im frustrated too... but there isnt much i can do besides keep going down the same old long road i have been going down for 6 years...i just call it the road to recovery... and hopefully things will start making sense the further along the road i get...

just dont give up, keep trying to find the right doctor for YOU... its so important to have a nice doctor that you can click with and get good treatment from rather than a doctor that is just going to give you a diagnosis and ship you out the door...

you know what i mean?
i don't think my doctors are qualified so much in the ways that i need them to be, but i like them and they are trying to help and its all i can do at the moment so until i can get better insurance and more qualified doctors, just have to keep working with what i can

keep working on recovery... i wish so much that i could say what it is that i have, as im sure you do too.. but sometimes that part takes time... hopefully by that time we can say "i HAD that" instead of this is what i have... meaning that we be better by that time?

i hope you're well...

@Michael W Harris

Also,another reason to let professionals do the diagnosing is because you could possibly be wrong.I would have assumed my brother is DID,I have witnessed his different self states firsthand,but he was diagnosed with BPD.

Maybe what you are experiencing is not a dissociative disorder,it could be PTSD,many people with it dissociate,maybe it's BPD or one of many other things,or you could have DID.Maybe your focus should be on getting well,whatever your diagnosis may be instead of spending all your time focusing on wanting a specific diagnosis?I personally wouldn't care if I was diagnosed with cow **** disorder as long as I got proper treatment and got well.

I am sure there are people here that would gladly give you their diagnosis if they could.Most people don't want it.

When I put myself in the Charter Hospital in Plano, Tx. back in 1994 it was so I could have contact with other people with this diagnosis. It cost me about $10,000.00 out of pocket.

The Dr. (psychiatrist) who finally got me admitted tried to diagnose me as clinically depressed within 15 minutes of meeting me. Would you call that a competent diagnosis? ( I had been told that Dr. Ross was setting up a pilot program for treating dissociative disorders at this Charter. I mistakenly thought he would be involved in some of the group therapies.) He and his two PHD clinical psychologists barely ever talked with me. They only did a few interviews. I had more communications with the bachelor degreed social workers or therapists that ran the group therapy programs. But it was the contact with the patients who had a positive diagnosis that helped me the most.

When I tell mental health professionals that I have a dissociative diagnosis, I do not expect them to immediately give me that diagnosis. It should have given them a focal point for treatment! I have learned that I have read more books on dissociative disorders than most psychologists and psychiatrists! I know that most of the mental health professionals that I paid never have read one book about it.

I am 61 years old with two bachelor degrees in engineering. I am also an honorably discharge veteran. How many PHDs can you get out of 61 years? Lets see 8 into 61??? We will just say five PHDs. I have five PHDs of being a human and being me. Just like religious bureaucrats, mental health professionals hate it when anyone questions their authority. The religious bureaucrats are trying to cover up knowledge about the Bible and the mental health professionals are trying to cover up incompetence.

In the field of psycho-therapy the business plan of most psychologists is to have multiple, maybe four max, patients a day for five days a week. At $100.00 per hour that equates to $2000.00 per week. I do not have a problem with that as long as the psychologists do not put the patients mental health at risk or their financial health at risk.

If you have already been given the diagnosis then this should be an entirely different conversation.I wasn't aware of that,I thought you had self diagnosed,judging by your posts.

Do you have documentation or do you have your records forwarded to new professionals you see?

What dissociative disorder do you have,if you don't mind me asking?

Dr. Nickeson, a PHD clinical psychologist in Orlando, gave me a dissociative diagnosis(otherwise specified), a borderline personality disorder diagnosis, extreme stress disorder diagnosis, PTSD, and episodal alcoholism.

The mental health professionals at the VA Clinic in Lake City never talked to me enough for me to discuss Dr. Nickeson's diagnosis.

Michael W. Harris: I empathize with you and feel frustrated for you - if not for your struggles with mental health practitioners, then with the never ending chorus of 'only a mental health practitioner can know what you have' variants.

I have been diagnosed with DID by a board certified mental health practitioner so I guess I get to say it.

I have been misdiagnosed by a board certified mental health practitioner more times than I can count - you know, all the typical misdiagnoses on the way to a DID dx. Since the psychiatric community has the last word on what I have and I am not allowed to know myself or psychiatry well enough to know what I have, then it's a pretty good thing I kept going to therapy for the schizophrenia, BPD, schizotypal PD, antisocial PD, etc., that I knew I didn't have so they could flip flop on my diagnosis at the age of fifty-one and finally get it right.

Too many psychiatrists get into the field to escape their own issues. Freud himself asserted that childhood loss was the underlying cause of an adult's desire to help others. And Freud's daughter, Anna, herself a prominent psychoanalyst, once said, "The most sophisticated defense mechanism I ever encountered was becoming a psychotherapist."

https://www.psychologytoday.com/arti...-have-problems

In my experience the more qualified a mental health professional is, the more likely they are to be a self aggrandizing pompous prick. I have found the most helpful practitioners around DID issues are the ones who know very little about it but are open to educating themselves.
And the whole diagnosis thing is just flippin annoying - I understand that sometimes a label is needed because that is how the funding / insurance system works, but a treatment system based on a diagnosis is a flawed one at best. All a diagnostic label does is describe a particular set of symptoms. But a human being is so much more complex than a 'particular set of symptoms'. In fact a human being is never made up of any one particular set of symptoms - they often don't have all those symptoms and nearly always have many symptoms that rightfully belong to other labels too. If we took all the labels away, we would still be left with human beings who have the same unique set of symptoms that they always had.

Wouldn't it be much easier to simply meet with a human being, get to know them, and then help them find ways to lessen / manage / heal the set of symptoms that they have? Wouldn't that work so much better??

Ok,now I understand your anger and frustration.There's no reason you shouldn't be able to find the treatment you are seeking.

I am sorry you have been struggling to find the help you need.

I don't know much, but I do know that after decades of treatment from different mh professionals, they want to evaluate for a diagnosis on their own, and that includes even things that you would think are no brainers, like depression. The ones I've seen only considered a previous diagnosis if it came with a medication and the medication worked for that specific condition. Ultimately, that's what they are after--what medication or therapy approach to take. It's even more difficult with something like d id which doesn't respond to medication, and is so hidden. And there are other factors that have to be considered, like substance abuse, which can skew things. My sister, for example, could say she loses time and behaves at odds with herself, but she's a black out drunk. Did the d id cause the drinking or is the drinking looking like a dissociative disorder? Btw, she does not have d id that I know of. With her, it's either drinking related or she has some kind of psychotic episodes. The main thing is, the drinking makes it hard to diagnose. So if that's on a person's medical record, it's just going to complicate things. I'm not saying it's fair or right, but it is something that will cause a mh professional to want to evaluate for themselves.

Let me use some of my engineering logic to try to explain this issue. When a person tells a psychologist or psychiatrist that he/she believes that he/she has a dissociative disorder, that mental health professional should immediately delve into the patient's childhood! That is common sense from just having a basic knowledge of the cause of the mental illness. I started going to Dr. Penny Gardberg, a PHD Clinical Psychologist in January 1992 and went to her for almost two years. I told her the first day that I thought I had a split personality. She never delved into my childhood.

Dr. Gardberg referred me to a Dr. John Tatum, a Psychiatrist. I went to him for almost a year. He, of course, thought I was just clinically depressed and put me on drugs. By the time I started going to him I had learned that they had changed the name from split-personality to multiple personality to dissociative disorders. While I was going to Dr. Tatum, he had me do a whole bunch of psychological tests with a PHD psychologist that worked with him. I am ashamed that I do not have any copies of those tests. But again Dr. Tatum never delved into my childhood.

After I stopped going to Dr. Tatum, I drove out to Dallas and put myself into the Charter Hospital just so I could talk to the patients.

These are the ways that a mental health professional should approach a patient who claims to have a dissociative disorder: First discuss the childhood experience. If there was obvious abuse or trauma during early childhood then a Borderline Personality Disorder and PTSD diagnosis should be given immediately. And, the mental health professional should suspect a possible dissociative diagnosis. It is that simple and that is one reason I am mad.

Dr. Ross published his book in 1980. I did not start going to treatment until 1992.

The next thing a mental health professional should do in treating the patient is to describe the mental illness to the patient's loved ones so that they understand what to look for in the patient and help!

When my wife, Molly McKinnon Harris and I started having problems, we went to a Dr. Ronnie Zuessman in Orlando. He was the first mental health professional that I told that I had a split personality. That was sometime around 1990. In front of my wife, he told me that was an extremely rare mental illness and that I was probably just clinically depressed. If he would have immediately asked me about my childhood and we could have discussed the abuses that I went through from newborn to five, and then told my wife Molly about the diagnosis so she could understand, I might not have gotten divorced! Molly, I am sure could have proven the dissociative disorder by discussing the communication that went on.

I have a milder case of dissociative disorder but it is still a dissociative disorder. The reason that I was not diagnosed as a child goes to the fact that my Father and Mother were emotionally sick people.