[Bells129]

I've been seeing mine for four years and still haven't been diagnosed. I have had a rough diagnoses from my T who says I have some sort of psychotic illness, but she says it's not her area to diagnose so she won't..and that's all I've had. Pdoc says he has no idea what's wrong, he says it's a combination of quite a few things and unclear. I think this is bull to be honest and am looking forward to getting a new pdoc. How long was it for you?

[Sometimes psychotic]

Saw pdoc number one and no diagnosis even after 2.5 years...to be honest I kind of forget to ask after a while. My T said schizophreniform which I agree with somewhere a couple of months in. New pdoc said brief psychotic disorder in session 1, but by session 2 she was talking possible bipolar so who knows....either they give them out like candy or don't want to make a decision at all.

[The_little_didgee]

Some clinicians are cautious and won’t diagnose you with a psychotic disorder unless the symptoms interfere with daily life. A lot of people experience hallucinations without psychosis. These experiences are quite common in the general population. Sometimes a clinician needs time, since it can be hard to distinguish psychotic disorders from dissociative disorders and PTSD.

I don’t really know what psychotic illness I have. I have been diagnosed with psychotic depression, brief reactive psychosis, psychotic disorder NOS, bipolar disorder and “schizophrenia spectrum”. The brief reactive psychosis diagnosis turned out to be wrong. It was actually Prozac induced mania, which I recently discovered. I always wondered about that experience, because it seemed to resemble a bipolar high rather than a euthymic-like psychosis. About 7 years after that experience I went through psychosis, which was very different from that experience.

It has been 10 years, and I still don’t know what I have. I probably won't know unless I become ill again.

Note: When you get a diagnosis, make sure it makes sense.

[Axiom]

I was diagnosed with bipolar II more than a year ago, then I got a new T and I started sharing my "weird" experiences. The T eventually referred me to a team that specializes in the differential diagnosis of affective and psychotic illnesses. I think it took about a year from when I met this T until I got the sz diagnosis, and it took the specialists about two months to reach a conclusion from talking to me and gathering information from other people and my charts. They said that since I am high-functioning in many areas I probably would not have been diagnosed with sz by less specialized doctors, but they're confident that I've been psychotic and that I have negative symptoms.

Edit: Ooops... dead thread.

[Sometimes psychotic]

Originally Posted by Axiom

Edit: Ooops... dead thread.

It's OK it's not that old---we're all still here and these are great for new people who come through to read....

[Atypical_Disaster]

It took years to get diagnosed correctly. I was diagnosed initially with psychotic depression or psychotic disorder NOS(I don't remember which), when I was in the hospital when I was 14 years old. When I was 15 I was diagnosed with schizophrenia, again this was when I was in the hospital. Then after that? My diagnosis got changed around a lot, every time I saw a different doctor they came up with something different.

My latest pdoc diagnosed me with schizophrenia when I first met with her because I had an extensive history with psychosis as it is. This year she finally arrived at the diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder bipolar type and it hasn't changed since.

So all in all, it took over eight years.