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Misdiagnosis

I would like to know the experiences of others with diagnosis.
I feel I have been misdiagnosed by a student in 5 minutes and have had consequences, which are very traumatic, for 11 years.

How did others receive a diagnosis?
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973741 tn?1342342773
Hi there,  I think misdiagnosis definitely can happen.  So many things overlay each other, mimic something else, or are comorbid. If you aren't thinking you got the right diagnosis, try again.  My son has been seen now probably by 20 different health care professionals.  He's had a major mental health crisis starting last winter and he's been in two different hospital settings, had several eyes on him and assessments.  I feel confident that we've got right diagnoses now. But honestly, a lot of things are treated with the same medications.   If you gave more details, I'd love to talk through it with you.  Do mistake happen?  Yes, sure.
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Mistakes happen in every human endeavor.  But as Mom says so correctly, different things are treated with pretty similar therapy and pretty similar meds.  I think what we all want more than anything is to get better, not wait until docs understand the brain.  We don't have that much time.  You know, I love those old movies where the Freud figure shows someone an ink blot or talks to them for two weeks and cracks the whole case, but in reality, Freud was wrong about almost everything.  Still, I love those movies.
Back in the early ‘70’s, I used to administer those ink blot tests.  Back then, the ones we used were the Rorschach tests.  They weren’t always helpful and only certain people got them, depending on symptoms.  
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I think you need to provide a lot more details.  Some diseases are easier to diagnose than others; some are very hard to diagnose and take a lot of time and expertise that most docs don't take the time to acquire.  Some are difficult because they are diagnosed by symptoms without any diagnostic tests being ale to definitely determine the existence of a particular disease.  Medicine isn't a field with a lot of knowledge.  It is a field with a lot of information and a lot of study being done but the human body is very hard to understand at this point in our history.  We spend a lot more time and money throughout history building weapons than we do figuring out health.  Tell us what disease you are concerned about and why you think your diagnosis was wrong.  Also, you say you were diagnosed by a student, which also demands explanation.  Usually a student is supervised by a physician and it's the physician who makes the diagnosis, so that is something you also need to supply more info if you want any answers.  Peace.
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Yes I would rather not go into details, but... I feel especially in relation to mental health, from what I understand, a Psychiatric Evaluation takes hours, if not days, along with  munchausen ink blots to assess personality, family history, and as I mentioned in other posts, tests like brain scans.

It cant be that because you enter the medical system, proper examination is not done.
No, you've been watching too many old movies.  I suffer from mental illness and have for years, and have never been given an ink blot test.  Nor have I ever had a true psychiatric evaluation.  I have had psychologists talk to me for years and try to figure out why I got mental illness and how I might make positive changes in my life.  I have had those idiotic questionnaires that would lead to every human being diagnosed as having a mental illness.  If you've ever taken a basic statistics class, you can see what they are driving at a mile away.  But here's the thing about mental illness as opposed to, say, the flu, which you can get a PCR test that tells you that you have it.  With mental illness in the end you end up telling the professional what's going on with you and they believe you and treat you accordingly.  They don't come to your home and see if your parents are driving you nuts.  They don't come to your home and watch you go about your life to see if you're lying to them or not.  They sit in their office and they never leave that office except for lunch and to go home at the end of the day.  They do no homework.  That's clearly not evidence based or scientific because they just don't know the why of mental illness.  You just have to try to fix things in therapy, by changing your lifestyle, or doing that plus taking medications that are trial and error because they all beat placebo by a very small amount in clinical trials (or with some of them not at all, such as Buspar).  If it works, everyone's glad, and if it doesn't, you try something else until you've exhausted what's out there.  In other words, keep trying, there's always someone with a different way of doing it that might work for you.
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