Let’s talk about diagnosing
So a lot of people fight about diagnosis. Mainly, many people think self-diagnosing mental health issues is bad and invalid. On the flip side, though, they also think you can’t possibly have more than some arbitrary low number of diagnoses, and any more is falsified in some way (you made it up, the doctor made it up, etc).
So I’m gonna make this post about diagnosis when it comes to psychiatry.
Why is self-diagnosis positive?
Many people can not afford the care that comes with official diagnosis. Contrary to seemingly popular belief, it doesn’t end at the diagnosis. Instead, a typical person diagnosed with a mental health issue will be cowed into having consistent visits, as well as some sort of treatment, usually either medication and/or therapy, which are also repeated throughout the year. The minimum I’ve ever seen someone have to visit a doctor/psychiatrist is once every two months, couple that with suggested weekly or monthly visits for therapy and/or medication monthly refills, and that gets expensive quick. Actually, I would say “expensive” is a pretty underwhelming descriptor. Then we get into the issue of comorbidity, which is that many disabilities and health issues frequently hold hands, and what seems to be a single issue is realized to be multifaceted (which makes sense because we’re human and human health is complicated). Because of that, this can exponentially increase the expenses accrued. All starting with one official diagnosis. For most of us, this level of care is luxury, no matter how much we need it (as we speak, I’m scrimping on two medications because I don’t have the money).
When a person realizes there’s a strong possibility that they have a certain issue, it makes it much easier for them to take care of themselves properly. They find communities to talk to, otc herbs, medicines, and other remedies they could try, helpful mental and physical exercises, ways of gleaning out the harmful relationships and abuse in their life, and so on. There is more to psychological care than prescriptions, insurance, and visits.
Additionally, finding out you most likely have an issue brings great relief. Being able to understand how you feel and why you act the way you do, and that there are others like you, lifts a huge weight off your shoulders.
Not all diagnoses are the same, and as such not all require action. So self-diagnoses can be made when a person doesn’t intend to get it checked on because it isn’t bothersome or otherwise isn’t worth the money, but still wants explanations and reassurance handy.
Why is it bad to be anti-self-diagnosis?
As mentioned, not everyone can afford medical care. Insisting people need to fork over their life savings to get what they already know told back to them and placed on special paper before you believe their issues are valid, is kicking all people who can’t afford this to the curb and denying them recognition as people with needs.
Not everyone has a support network that will even ALLOW them to access care. Many people who self-diagnose are minors, and they do so because they are afraid of their parents’ retribution for asking for help, or have already asked for help and been denied it. It’s beyond common, especially since mass media makes sure to discredit childhood diagnoses, by insisting it’s an issue because of poor/lazy parenting, lazy/bratty kids, greedy doctors, mass hysteria, and other claims of them not being real or legitimate diagnoses.
The psychiatry field is full of ableism and medical abuse. Many people are afraid to seek medical attention because of past experiences or because of friends’/family’s experiences.
You can’t see a doctor over anything without a self-diagnosis. Doctors do not have special medical powers that allow them to see everything wrong with a person. No, a person has to suspect an issue or think they have something, before they can seek treatment for it. That’s self-diagnosis.
A degree does not automatically denote authority. Legal, sometimes, but in general, not necessarily. People with degrees are not always right and can definitely be matched by people without. Education is important, but it doesn’t require a degree to be valid; that is, many people are well educated without a degree. Insisting a degree and paid classes are the only way a person is educated and that only these people are to be listened to is classist. Consider the fact that many minds that we respect never had a college education or never finished their degree programs. There’s a whole issue here about shitty politics and capitalism pushing out certain groups from being allowed to have an opinion, but that’s digression.
Continuing on that point, general practitioners, including people who are not actually doctors (nurse practitioners, physician’s assistants, etc), are legally able to diagnose mental health issues. The reason I point this out is because a lot of people say that a psychiatrist’s “years in studying psychiatry” can not be competed against, but in reality most specialists’ work can be easily done by those who did NOT do all those extra years. So there’s strike one against that argument. Strike two is that medicine is being changed all the time, which means there are many psychiatrists out there who are NOT actually fully immersed in the current data and issues of mental health. Strike three? No matter which provider you choose, there isn’t a huge deal to go through to diagnose you with a mental issue. I literally filled out a survey and was diagnosed and prescribed medication in the same day, a 45 minute visit (including waiting time). This is exactly how the vast majority of mental health diagnoses are done - in fact, I’ve seen some bigger hospital chains offer these kinds of surveys online and then help you plan an appointment based on your results. It’s nothing super complicated because to be frank most issues aren’t difficult to figure out.
I’ve browsed multiple books, including DSMs, and basically each issue is listed with a watered down definition and a handful of primary symptoms plus a handful of less prominent symptoms, sometimes mentioning comorbidity and how to check symptoms, as well as physical health issues that may come as a result of an issue or may cause an issue. Meanwhile, the Internet has full explanations of each issue, full lists of symptoms, full explanations of comorbidity, full explanations of physical health relations, and so on. You really gonna tell me that a person is completely incapable of making an accurate or fairly accurate judgement on their mental health, with this vast wealth of information at their disposal? That only someone who has been relying on quick ref manuals for several or more years is able to realize something’s up?
What are the drawbacks of official diagnosis?
To start with, they aren’t fully necessary. For many, an initial diagnosis is made, and then no more diagnoses are added to official records, but your healthcare providers will believe you regardless. Recently, I’ve been given snapshots of my health record during my visits, and, despite being confirmed for much more, I really only have depression listed as being officially diagnosed, with “anxiety issues” being mentioned in notes. However, I have still been taken seriously by every healthcare provider when I talk about those other issues, and have successfully filed temporarily disability and FMLA paperwork in the past. Many times, it’s a paid formality, and an expensive one.
There is still a lot of discrimination against disabled persons allowed and excused, up to and including murder, denial of care, and mutilation.
— Parents, caretakers, and partners of mentally disabled persons are met with sympathy when they murder them, refuse them proper care, abuse and isolate them, force surgery on them (typically sterilizations), and other heinous crimes.
— Additionally, disabled persons (mental and physical), especially children, are an exponentially high risk group when it comes to rape, relationship/domestic abuse, harassment, and murder. This is particularly amplified when the disabled person is part of another marginalized group (such as being a poc).
— Police brutality frequently targets the mentally disabled because it’s easier to claim we’re dangerous or were threatening, based on mass media’s portrayal of mental health issues.
— Healthcare practitioners frequently deny care based on mental health status. This particularly affects fat people, woc, LGBT people, autistic people, and children. They’ll insist their other issues are part of their mental issues, that there’s no way a person could have x issue if they have y mental health problem, or they will speak over the person and make decisions against their will.
— It is legal to pay disabled people less than minimum wage.
Essentially, an official diagnosis makes you a target.
Where does self-diagnosis go wrong?
Without an official diagnosis or at least a note from a psychiatrist, you can be denied assistance in many things. This becomes most apparent in two areas: education and employment. Without some form of documentation, you may not be excused for sick/bad days, may be denied monetary compensation, may be denied the ability to take otc medications, may be denied accommodations and instruments for your disability, may be denied being excused from projects, and more.
Average people will refuse to believe your issues are valid and need discussion, allowances, and/or treatment, which often leads to amplification of these issues as well as abuse and harassment.
What is the real deal behind anti-self-diagnosis?
Being anti-self-diagnosis intersects with a lot of issues of bigotry, primarily classism, ageism, and sexism; the poor, the young, and women are targeted the most or are the first to be thrown under the bus as prime examples of “going too far”. Teen girls are always held as the beacons of stupidity in many places in society, and that’s no accident.
“Attention whoring” is a non-issue and has never been an issue for anything ever. Every human being wants attention in some way or another, because we are a social species and our mental health thrives when we are given positive feedback, for our good and bad times. There is literally nothing wrong with wanting attention, nor is there anything wrong with giving it. Because “attention whoring” is considered by the Internet to be the worse thing you can ever do, many people are afraid to come out or admit a lot of their feelings and struggles, and this does include offline. People are petrified of receiving mountains of harassment and threats of violence if they so much as peep about feeling not all right with themselves. You really don’t need any lessons in psychology to understand how that can take a person struggling with mental health down south fast.
The consistent complaint is that you need recognized years of psychological studies under your belt in order to be heard on this issue. But this isn’t really what people think. Firstly, I’ve seen multiple psychology students, therapists, and psychiatrists come out in favour of self-diagnosis, and they are shouted down as enablers instead of listened to, but this isn’t what I’m most concerned about (after all, it’s rare you see professionals on a social networking fun site). Instead, what I find suspect is that despite these complaints, these critics like to posit themselves as being able to make psych calls despite not having this golden EXP. They dictate how a person can identify, they decide whether someone’s self harm or suicide note is legitimate or “attention whoring”, they proclaim what can and can’t be a trigger, they tell us what is and isn’t good for our mental health, they draw the lines between “excusable” and “inexcusable” when it comes to typing style and attitudes influenced by mental health, they decree when it is and isn’t possible to have multiple mental health issues, they declare what symptoms should and shouldn’t be present. They play armchair psychologist far more than anyone who self-diagnoses has.
There is no distinction between the self-diagnosed and the officially diagnosed when it comes to what “makes [us] look bad”. I have literally never seen anyone use their disability or assumed disability as an illegitimate excuse, but I always see some shitpeel making a drawn-out post about how disability isn’t an excuse (and it’s left open-ended so that it can be decided on the fly what we can’t be excused for). I’ve been on the Internet for longer than 10 years, and in this time I’ve realized that all this time, nobody’s actually been ruining it for anyone except for the people making the accusations of things being ruined. As I’ve detailed here in multiple points, the fear-mongered gate-keeping has been what’s doing the damage this whole time.
And in spite claims of lofting official diagnosis above all, multiple times these people say that a person is lying about their diagnosis or somehow managed to trick a professional into diagnosing them, or that they must be somehow misdiagnosed.
So, in short, people who are anti-self-diagnosis don’t really care about the mentally disabled, about our community, about our struggles, and don’t know shit about mor care about mental healthcare or psychology in general. They’re just clinging to a label for an excuse to be ableist.
