A friend of mine self-diagnosed with depression about 10 years ago. Went to a therapist about a year later and the therapist just accepted the self-diagnosis. Cue 9 years of no treatments working at all. She went to an ER about 6 months ago for something unrelated and they ended up running her thyroid levels. Super, super hypothyroidism. Been on synthroid for 5 months and NIGHT AND DAY. She's happy, has energy, appropriate sleeping schedule, losing weight. It's amazing. She didn't think to add her cold-intolerance to her list because she didn't think it was relevant. She didn't think to add hair loss to her Google search for self-diagnosis. So many hypothyroid issues she didn't add to her search because she'd gone in with an unconscious confirmation bias for depression.
This is a great example of why its important to see a dr and one that will try and find the root of your symptoms for you! The depression symptoms could be from major depressive disorder, or it could be from a different depressive order like bi-polar. It could be a nutrient deficiency or some sort of illness. The point of a diagnosis is to be able to treat your symptoms properly to make you a healthier and happier person. Sometimes a self diagnosis is correct (you have to identify symptoms before you can be treated for them after all (and I was correct about my own MDD)) but health (especially mental health) is sort of like a puzzle or an investigation. You need trial and error to find the root cause. People get attached to a label they find for themselves and are resistant if that label might change. You see this with ADHD and autism a lot unfortunately. Being like "these symptoms sound a lot like me, I think im autistic" is fine but you will hopefully follow that up by seeing a dr and being open to exploring the cause of your symptoms. It sucks for the person who diagnosed themselves as ND and refuses a possibility of it being anything else and therefore is refusing treating the root of their issues, and it sucks for people like me who actually do have ADHD but whos voice is being drowned in a sea of people who probably dont actually have the disorder. The amount of Instagram accounts that post info graphs and opinions that are presented as factual that are run by people who PROUDLY PROCLAIM they are self diagnosed is disturbing.
Tbf not sure if self diagnosing was THE problem that led to 9 years of the wrong kind of treatment. From people in my life I’ve seen doctors diagnosis things as depression so easily without trying to figure out why. Literally know 2 people who answered those short mental health questionnaires from their general practitioner honestly and were offered a prescription for depression without looking into it any further. One has severe trauma and should really be seen by a mental health professional to deal with it. The other had school work and family issues thrown on him at once and he needed help getting his life together not just drugs thrown at him. Your friend went to the professional saying they were depressed and the professionals are the one that didn’t bother looking for the true cause. They failed at their actual job. If anything your friend did what they were supposed to. They went to a professional shortly after seeing signs of a problem. The professional did exactly what the example Dr K showed and was biased towards MDD instead of looking into other things like hypothyroidism. Might be an example of how self diagnosing can be wrong but it really does highlight issues with how some professional diagnose even greater
I've thought for years I was depressed or had anxiety, but I noticed recently I stopped really feeling that dread. I stopped crying, I smile and laugh and it feels genuine. I thought I was faking it for so long I started believing it, but I think I was lying to myself the whole time. I feel like I was just making excuses to avoid my problems, and all these years I spent moping I was just trying to avoid doing things I didn't want to do. I was never diagnosed, and I never really wanted help, just thinking about it all makes me sick. If anything I deserve to genuinely experience those things, being so ignorant and entitled, so twisted to emulate such behavior. I'm not sure if I'd even believe it if I were diagnosed
Because there is really no such thing as mental illness, if you take enough philosophy courses and have a foundation in logic then you go read psychology it's very obvious it's nothing but pseudoscience, self-diagnosis is required. Even though a psychiatrist may make a diagnosis if one goes to a psychiatrist he must fill out many forms of self-reporting that is the only way to tell there is such a purported illness. If the psychiatrist cannot make a diagnosis without such self-report how is self diagnosing mental illness not the standard? There been so many studies proving that psychiatrists can't make a consistent diagnosis when showing the same patient to multiple psychiatrists, in short the field is nothing but pseudoscientific garbage with a bunch of charlatans pushing pharmaceuticals for no other reason than big paychecks. The real screwed up part is most of them know the drugs don't cure anything and deal with symptoms indirectly while causing tremendous side effects..
I've done months of research on adhd (how I stumbled upon your channel). But I've always told myself I could be completely wrong and I'm going to have to be ok with that. It's invalidating/demoralizing when ppl just assume you saw one article and decided you have whatever. I'm trying to get a diagnosis, however, research is all I got right now
I felt the same way - I tried to keep an open mind and recognize that a therapist might think differently. I wasn't wrong though, and I got the diagnoses. My best bit of advice is to analyze if and how these symptoms overlap with symptoms of depression and anxiety. A lot of mental health professionals are quick to dismiss ADHD symptoms as symptoms of depression and anxiety, so if you can think far enough back to your childhood and assure that symptoms of ADHD were present before any other potential illnesses, it could save you a lot of time they might try to spend ensuring that your symptoms aren't just something else.
I would see if you can get a referral from your doctor for a psychiatric evaluation. They take a while but I think it is worth doing. I was sure I had ADHD, but it ended up being really bad anxiety. Most of the symptoms are the same, but the treatment is different. I was already diagnosed with anxiety by my psychiatrist, but the eval made it much more evident just how bad it was.
@@joshi897 yep! I watched a video that talked about looking at symptoms in your child hood. So I did that and WOW, I missed so many things. Things I thought was normal. I can see why my mom would always get mad at me for forgetting to take out the trash lol
Good luck to you! I never suspected I had ADHD but multiple other people asked me if I did. The first tipoff that I actually did have it was when I was prescribed phentermine for weight loss and it did nothing. I realized I had actually never had any effect from any stimulant (coffee etc). After self medicating for many years and decades of misdiagnoses and failed treatments for depression , anxiety etc... I finally found a wonderful psychiatrist who believed me and didn't talk to me like I was an id10t. It is possible ♥️
The purpose of getting a diagnose is to get help to improve it. Did you go and get some help? ADHD is like any mental illness on a spectrum. Where to the left is Zero symtoms and when its a problem in your day to day life then you have illness.
Dude yes, getting a diagnosis can be extremely liberating. I lived for ~24 years as an undiagnosed autistic and when a friend asked me "could you be on the autism spectrum?", it prompted me to research that. After deeply looking into it, I began telling family and friends that I suspect I'm autistic. I immediately got shut down at every turn and they invalidated all of the concerns I listed that motivated my opinion. Then, I saw a clinical psychologist and got diagnosed. Unfortunately, my actual diagnosis barely changed anything at all, but at least now I know it isn't just made up or anything, I really am autistic and all of these struggles over the years have been legitimate. The validation and liberation was one of the best experiences of my life. I finally know why I feel so different from others and why I stand out from any crowd I'm in, etc.
Interestingly, I looked into several other conditions that could have explained some of my symptoms over the years and I ruled them out as I went along. By the time I was 24 and the friend asked about autism, I had already stopped looking into anything and I had gaslighted myself into thinking I'm completely normal and everyone is secretly going through exactly the same stuff I was. So I sort of ruled out a lot (schizophrenia, psychopathy, OCD, and more) because I had some symptoms that matched those in some contexts, but then a few would mis-match so hard that it was obvious that those would have been inappropriate. I wish I knew what was normal while I was growing up. In hindsight, it's so obvious that I'm autistic, but I just never knew what was normal, so I never knew that I wasn't normal...
@@MathIguessvery similar experience! I started self diagnosing at around 30 and was confirmed autism at 32. If the 8 therapists that I had since I was 7 years old had actually cared about looking for causes instead of making me feel guilty and/or sick for my symptoms I'd have saved myself A LOT of suffering.
@@eprd313 yeah, something I didn't highlight in my initial comment was the immense suffering that one can go through when coping with undiagnosed neurodivergence. I'd never wish that on anyone. Often, some of the behaviours that are normal for us, are characterised as "naughty" or wrong in general. This can lead to horrible self esteem, denial of our basic (neurodivergent) needs, assuming far more responsibility in contexts where we can't handle that responsibility which leads to burnout or overstimulation.. the list goes on. I am doing my best to bring it to the attention of those around me that mental health awareness is really important and especially parents should educate themselves on the signs so that they can get their child the accommodations or help that they need. The stigma needs to be broken... Sorry, I think I digressed. I was initially trying to extend empathy, being undiagnosed was really not good for me so if it was similar for you, then I'm really sorry for that. I'm glad you learned the truth though and I'm glad you're enabled to be more kind to yourself from here on :)
Wow yeah, I’m 22 and am undiagnosed but I studied psych in school because I was obsessed with trying to learn about the way people (including myself) act, and while doing so studied a lottttt on different mental disorders and disabilities. I always ruled out autism because I honestly just didn’t want to consider it; I had the stereotypical idea of autism in my head, which seemed harder to accept at the time than all my friends who were self diagnosing with adhd and stuff. But I knew I definitely could rule out every other thing for one reason or another. Finally I’m now looking into autism and I started reading “unmasking autism” by Devon Price (which i highly recommend if you haven’t read it), and literally cried through the prologue because I had never heard my experience and my exact feelings told so specifically. Then to look at the history and the diagnosis I started having memories come back that I haven’t remembered in forever and it’s just been wild. And because of all of this I’ve become so self aware in and also confident in a way I never was. I’ve been able to distinguish between autistic burnout and depression. I got diagnosed with depression because I was too socially anxious to go to see a doctor, so I did the whole intake online and got diagnosed that day and prescribed anti depressants. The meds didn’t really work most of the time, and I thought it was weird to call it depression because most of the time I wasn’t even sad, I just had no energy. That’s all I could say sometimes to ppl asking what was wrong, “no energy.” Idk it’s just really cool to finally have an explanation like this because literally my whole childhood and identity issues and my problems with my parents are rooted in this. This is probably my 4th time sharing my experience online in weird places because I’m still building a friend group and it’s felt so good connecting with people on this. Still not officially diagnosed but it would be seriously weird if it was something else. Also would be weird to relate so heavily to a first person autistic experience lol
I self-diagnosed myself with ADHD after tons of research and then got myself a doctors appointment(I’m Canadian don’t worry) talked to my doctor, she set me up with some stuff to give my mum and teachers, when I handed them back I got diagnosed with combined type ADHD(severe). The only reason I hadn’t been diagnosed sooner was because my brain was able to brute force low 90s to high 80% in classes💀
I think many people misunderstand self-diagnose with faking disorders and stuff, like nowadays we kinda pass through some people faking illnesses bc they think it's "silly" or to get views online. In my opinion self-diagnose is more like doing research and getting to know yourself better and going to a psychologist to know more about yourself. Faking disorders is still a problem that most people don't separate from self-diagnose.
Exactly.. true. I feel like a depression might a result of something bigger that was left unaware of maybe. I literary fit one mild disorder on schizophrenic spectrum, in all 'checkboxes' (no match for all checkboxes in anything else i found) and i kind of feel even ashamed to even mention it here. Lets see what my new psychiatrist is going to think about it. I had like two psychogists and they were so nonresponsive, felt like talking to a microphone. Meanwhile making stuff up is bad, cant blame some people that they havent found anything more sensible to believe in.
But the issue is that the amount research people do varies. While there are cases like what you mentioned there are also people who use surface level information to diagnose themselves. Sometimes people can convince themselves that they have an issue even when they don’t because the human brain is susceptible to bias. In some of those cases people will even start exhibiting symptoms they didn’t have until they researched it. The real issue with self diagnosis is a lack of clinical knowledge and the inability to be objectivite.
Exactly. The vast, vast majority of self-diagnosers dont change their behavior for attention. Thats easy to forget with the way cringe culture puts a spotlight on the outliers who do fake mental illnesses
I got differentially diagnosed into being put on a medication to treat anxiety that caused me to have severe depression and anxiety. Fuck Lexapro and fuck the Medical-Industrial Complex that loves to dole out physically addictive antidepressants like they're handing out candy.
I agree with him, although I'd say there's two or three things you get from a doctor that generally make it preferable. The differential diagnosis, treatment and potentially notes to hand in when requesting accommodations. But, that being said, sometimes the diagnoses are just broken. Schizoid Personality Disorder, Autism Spectrum Disorder and Social Pragmatic Communication Disorder are all autism and likely to eventually be fixed at some point. Those first two, the ScPD and ASD are virtually impossible to tell apart in many cases without a lot of extra testing because ScPD started out as the adult version of what would become Asperger's Syndrome. The two are a massive amount of overlap, but the fact that ScPD is considered to be a personality disorder, it doesn't require as much evidence from the past as ASD does. This is especially problematic for adults of a generation before the cameras were everywhere, as it can be hard to provide the necessary supporting evidence to say for sure that it's autism versus just being schizoid.
@@SmallSpoonBrigade Oh yeah for sure the diagnostic criteria are jank as hell sometimes. But it's also important to remember that because mental health diagnosis is almost always based on symptoms and not specific cause, diagnostic criteria is always going to be drawing borders in moving water. What we're taught in psychologist training is that diagnoses are mainly for bureucracy, and really clients should be treated as individuals with their own individual sets of symptoms.
So basically rather than saying that the diagnoses are broken, I would say that at any given moment they represent reality to some degree, but getting them completely "correct" is impossible. Our socially shared definitions of mental health & specific diagnoses are ever-changing and differ culturally. Treating diagnoses like they're the end-all to mental health is bad practice.
I self diagnosed my adhd, and later got an actual diagnosis from a psychiatrist. Before I could afford an actual professional diagnosis, I still was working on improving my situation. The research helped me function better and helped with my depression. Self diagnosis saved my life from self deletion. Not everyone has my experience but some probably do… and for them it’s worth it. And when I could afford a professional diagnosis, I wasn’t shocked and neither were my loved ones.
Ok but the underlying moral of your story should be to check with a professional before handing yourself a mental label cuz someone online gave a short list of things you might have.
Not a mental illness, but a chronic illness. I had a gut feeling about my diagnosis as a teen. Took FIFTEEN years to get "bad enough" and find a doctor that actually listened and paid me any attention before I got proper help and a diagnosis. Definitely follow your gut and fight for yourself to find one of the good docs out there.
I'm curious what was the illness and what was the symptoms? (If you're not comfortable it's ok, I just I believe it would help other people who might also have those symptoms if you share about it)
For people with anxiety same follow your gut is about the most unhelpful thing you can ever tell them because anxiety makes their own brain an unreliable source of what is and is not a problem
yes, follow your gut, but don’t continuously go to doctors until they give you the answer you’re looking for. i was misdiagnosed as having Bipolar One. i always knew it was incorrect, but i didn’t go browsing around for a different diagnosis. it wasn’t until i was 20 that i went back to treatment, for an unrelated matter. turns out i have Borderline Personality Disorder w/ co-morbid, Moderate To Severe Post Traumatic Stress. it made all the sense in the world, once it was spelled out for me. idealizing/devaluing, jealousy, uncontrollable rage, paranoid ideation + dissociation, intense fear of abandonment.
@@orbitalchildfollow your gut doesn't mean believe everything that your mind says. I see it more like don't gaslight yourself when you feel that a diagnosis isn't accurate or complete, and if something resonates look for solid answers.
I didn't need a dictor to know that i suffered from chronic depression till my twenties. Eventually you'll realize that its not normal to walk around like an emotionless corps with nothing but a constant stream of negative and suicidal thoughts running through your head. And when i got rid of that i didn't need a doctor to know that i have transitioned to anxiety disorder when you suddenly fear everything down to your own shadow despite not being in danger and never feeling this way before. I am now relatively healthy as far as i can tell and it was precisely because of self diagnosis and self therapy.
The challenge with self diagnosis is people seem to simply search for confirmation of a specific diagnosis. It’s almost as if it allows them to go, “ah ha! I knew there was a reason for X!”. Then they may overestimate the issue, at least in my case. I definitely fell prey to this while learning more about social anxiety. It genuinely increased my level of anxiety at an artificially rapid rate. The internet is a wild place.
Yes! And if a doctor tells them they don't have the diagnosis, they will see different doctors until one finally diagnoses them with the condition and they'll be like ah ha all those other doctors were incompetent, only this doctor who gave me the diagnosis that I wanted knows what they're doing.
@@vans4lyf2013 it’s tricky though, just because a doctor says yes or no though isn’t an absolute. Doctors can misdiagnose either way, they’re not perfect, doctors can also have confirmation bias. Get a consensus. If you have 4 doctors saying you do and 1 saying you don’t, go with the 4. I agree though don’t ignore the 4 and go with the 1 saying you do have it.
I once went to the doctor and told him I had severe depression (it was dead obvious to me as I was borderline suicidal at the time). He wrote me off with "high blood pressure". After a test my blood pressure was perfect. This is just one example out of many, and I have given up on going to doctors as they haven't fixed any of my issues ever.
Yeah same here, got a pat on the back and told I'll be fine meanwhile I was thinking about how I'd do it for a large part of the day. On another time I got a *just* Rorschach at a clinical psychologist and told I'm fine, even while he saw I struggled to even think of enough interpretations of the blotters(half of them I had to make up completely unrelated to the images just so he was satisfied and had "enough")
I once went to my doctor begging her to help me with my lifelong insomnia. (This was about a decade after I first realized the way I slept wasnt normal or healthy and the third doctor i asked for help on the matter.) She brushed it off as poor diet & exercise habits due to obesity. I pointed out the PCOS diagnosis to her in my chart and described my dietary and exercise habits. I told her I had just as much trouble sleeping as a skinny prepubescent child as I do now as a slightly overweight adult. She confidently came to the conclusion that my insomnia was caused by lifelong anxiety and depression. I told her my insomnia was not associated with a restless mind. She brushed me off and perscribed me a 7 day supply of an anti-anxiety medication. Told me to try it anyways and request a refill once I realize it worked. I never slept worse in my life than I did those 7 days. I ended up giving up on trying to get accepted for a sleep study after over a decade of trying and now just take CBD to fall asleep. The only time doctors ever took me seriously and actually provided me a proper formal diagnosis was when they diagnosed me with PCOS, but it took FOUR YEARS of me telling my PCP my periods were still irregular before they offered me any help whatsoever. But now I have to correct every doctor who isnt a gynocologist about my condition because they try to make conclusions about my health based on common myths and easily disputable misinformation about the condition.
Self diagnosis may be helpful for certain people if it also makes them seek further help and/or targeted treatment, but there are huge limitations. Your example with hypothyroidism was well chosen; if one thinks they have depression, but actually suffer from hypothyroidism, they'll probably land in a situation of severe crisis once they notice that months of practicing mindfulness, eating healthily, cultivating productive habbits, etc. doesn't help them…
Though ultimately, if a person couldn't access a diagnosis anyway due to financial or life reasons than its not like mindfulness, eating healthy, or cultivating productive habits harmed them either. Unfortunately, not self diagnosing doesn't always mean being able to seek an official diagnosis.
and furthermore, self diagnosing can be the motivation to seek an official diagnosis for those that can and hopefully uncover those other issues once with a medical professional.
the vast majority of peoples "mental disorders/illnesses" are just perfectly normal and healthy responses to being tortured to death slowly like our lovely economic system thinks is fine to do to 99% of the human species lol. most people are literally starving to death and will die from labor induced starvation / the problems it causes.
@@saturationstation1446 I don’t know if there’s anydata to support the idea that 99% of clinical mental health concerns are fabricated or solely due to society. I’m sure there are quite a few, but many people are born with a clinical illness
Just pointing out how he said we when referring to women. Treating men and women as separate species happens so often these days and it warms my heart to see people like you truly acknowledging our humanity, Thank You.
After doing intense research for months, I diagnosed myself with ADHD. The first two professionals dismissed me "because I wasnt jumping around and could listen to them". I am SO GLAD that I did not listen and instead informed myself, because I found a doctor who believed me and put me on meds. I changed doctors now, but I still get my meds and it changed my life for the better. I believe that its all about the amount of research and self reflection you do, in my case I immensly profited from it, I wouldn't have gotten diagnosed officially otherwise
I'm glad you had a good outcome here, I actually had the exact same thing happen to me with my BPD and I'm currently going through it with ADHD. I was so bloody certain I had BPD, just the whole thing resonated so comfortably with everything I'd experienced, I had to seek out the diagnosis though for sure, and I got lucky that I found the clinical psychologist that I did who was extremely in-depth and diagnosed me with not only BPD but other things I didn't realise I had to the extent of the diagnoses. Always trust yourself if you well and truly feel like something resonates with you to the deepest extent.
@@simply_pet exactly. If you feel like you are being misinterpreted, thats absolutely valif and probably true. Sadly I made a lot of bad experiences with ignorant doctors, and without doing my own research I'd be way worse than I am right now.
I always feel some type of way when I see someone claim success about finally getting the diagnosis they want after doctor shopping to get it, because the other doctors refused to give it to them. If several doctors are saying you don't have it and one finally says you have it, couldn't it be the case that more likely than not you don't actually have the condition? I see this with ADHD and Autism in particular all the time. People will say the string of doctors who didn't diagnose them are incompetent, and use the fact that they finally found one doctor to diagnose them as evidence that they were right the whole time...maybe they do have the condition but the fixation of wanting to be a diagnosed with a specific condition just seems a bit strange to me.
My first psychiatrist thought I was an opiate addict. Second psychiatrist diagnosed me with major depression and Bipolar. Second therapist diagnosed me with DID, Bipolar w Psychosis, and ADHD. Then dismissed prior autism diagnoses. The treatment from the last (whom i still have) has helped me so much. She even found me a psychiatrist she works with often. Always good to keep looking. Btw, I have a long psychiatric medical history. Since I was like 3 years old. I gathered over 11+ psychiatric diagnoses. Redundant and repetitive throughout my life. I'm finally healing
I'm so sorry to hear about the incompetency of your previous doctors, and am glad to hear you are finally on the right path. I've been struggling for about 3 years between 4 different doctors who've all given different diagnoses, but think I've also finally found one that can actually listen to me.
I entered the mental health field, as a patient, when I was around 13 (the first time I remmeber going to a therapist). I've been in and out of hospitals and have many misdiagnoses along the way. I finally got a proper diagnosis and began getting proper treatment when I was 36 years old. So many years not understanding why meds didn't help or why symptoms didn't fit. So many years thinking I was just too broken and not capable of healing or understanding myself. Nobody asked the write questions and things that were pathological were being grossly overlooked. I feel more free now despite the uncertainty I face daily. At least I know what's causing the uncertainty.
I was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia before my psychiatrist changed it to bipolar with psychosis (now bipolar 1 with psychosis). I was lucky in that the medication was reacting so badly for me that my diagnosis changed within 2 months. I'm sure I probably have co-mental illnesses, as my family history is repleate with mental illness 🤒. But my major problem has and is my psychosis. It is worse when I'm in a depressed state. But if I have no sound like videos or music, I start to hear voices, and sometimes I will unwilling answer them outloud. This has a tendency to freak people out. My husband will look at me odd and ask if I'm up on my meds. I just try to listen to long TH-cam videos and podcasts to try to keep the psychosis in check.
I love the message: go ahead and research, come to your own conclusion, and share those with the professional. The patient’s insight plus the doctor’s expertise, working together, can be really powerful. Doctor’s need to listen to patience too. I’ve had great luck with this with my doctors. In my experience, therapists seem to be worse at this than regular doctors, ironically. Notably absent from this discussion is the access issues involved in living under a for-profit healthcare system. People may be less prone to self diagnosing if access to medical treatment was affordable, i.e., accessible.
yep, this is the big one. many people have no option BESIDES self diagnosis and treatment especially considering many of the diagnoses we're talking about make it much harder to go and see a professional or effectively communicate their experience to a professional, even for those who have the time and money to do so i for example have pretty bad social anxiety which would make it very difficult for me make an appointment and talk to a professional
@@RobinTheBot and aside from for profit healthcare, there's still a lot of racial and other biases leading to misdiagnosis due to drs not believing what's being communicated with them or drs not taking them seriously.
Yup, price is an important factor as well. My best friend had to pay 3,000 USD for a mental health assessment where the diagnostician actually refused a diagnosis for ASD even though he met all the diagnositic criteria because he "has too many friends to be autistic. Autistic people don't usually have many friends if any at all," which is blatantly untrue. I had to loan him half the money he needed for that assessment. What do people expect him to do? Go to the bank and ask for another $3,000 loan to find a better assessor? What if that one is also discriminatory against autistic people? Where do people think we have the time and money to spend thousands of dollars on pursuing an accurate diagnosis?
I am not officially diagnosed with Autism, but I feel like I have it due to some very hyper specific traits I have heard. However the biggest issue I have found is autism diagnosis is apparently REALLY HARD in adults because autistic adults have built up their masking techniques. I also really do not have time or money for therapy any more, but I really really want an official diagnosis. Two things that really made me look in the mirror and ask were: I heard a guy describing his autism as feeling like a different species than everyone around you. As a child I literally thought I was an Alien or an Angel/Nephilim because I legitimately did not know how to relate to other kids. It took years of stepping on social landmines till I found the 'correct' techniques for "how to be human". The second thing is I have had a lot of discussions with friends, acquaintances, coworkers, etc. who are officially diagnosed with autism and there always was a point in our conversations where they would say something like, "So how long have you known you've had autism?" or "When did you get diagnosed with autism?" or "You get it, it's hard having autism am I right?" and my response was always, "Oh no no no I don't have autism." And then it kind of just was one of those wow a lot of autistic people say relatable things and a lot of them also are asking if I have autism... wait a second.... Basically what I tell people is, "I do not have a doctors diagnosis, but I have found that I relate to experiences of people with autism and I have found that some of the behavioral techniques they employ to make it through the day also help me with my feelings. Therefore I feel I might have it, but as I said I am not officially diagnosed."
Same. An autism diagnosis is so difficult to find. I've talked about it to my doctors, therapists, and psychiatrists over the last couple years and they're all like "¯\_(ツ)_/¯ maybe, hard to find someone who can actually screen you lol" and give zero direction towards resources. I'm not like "I 100% am autistic", but a diagnosis still isn't something I can access despite seeking it out.
i’ve suspected i’ve had it for some time now, and have looked into numerous resources such as the dsm and resources adjacent to them. i’m 20, and am on a waitlist to get tested, but i don’t know if it’s worth it at my age. the only thing i believe it would give me, and what i’ve heard from others, is clarity. but i’ve dealt with it for so long that i don’t know if it’s worth getting one
When I was younger, I self-diagnosed myself with an anxiety disorder, and I've always known this to be completely true. My earliest memories of age 5 include being absolutely terrified, unable to sleep or calm my mind, and my family mocked me and called me a "worry wart." They said to just "stop worrying." I have lived with anxiety for my entire life, and it's never gone away, not once. As I got older, I had my first panic attack, and those became more frequent very quickly. I also went through some traumatic things though, so I've wondered whether or not it's the anxiety causing my panic attacks or if I have PTSD. Either way, I know for certain that I have anxiety, and I also dealt for depression for around 6 years. Not professionally diagnosed, but do you need to be when every day is a struggle to keep yourself alive? It was bad. I feel like anxiety and depression are the easiest to self-diagnose. With that said, there was a short time in high school where I convinced myself that I had schizophrenia. No, I don't have it. But I wrote a list, checked off symptoms, and made a calendar where I jotted down what affected me each day. I'm embarrassed by it all now, but at the time, convincing myself I had something I didn't was easier than facing the truth. The truth was that I was actively experiencing trauma in those years, and it was a very complicated and messy situation. I think people should be careful when they are reading about disorders online. It's easy to say "this is definitely me, this is what I have," but that's not always true. It could be something very different. Do your research and self-reflection, but keep your mind open and don't settle on the first disorder you read about. Sometimes you just KNOW what it is, like I did with anxiety, but sometimes we're wrong. It could be anything, and you don't want to diagnose yourself with the wrong disorder.
I definitely relate to you, I was so traumatized at 16 that I couldn't speak to people without thinking horrific things. I thought I was manic, insane, no going back from the deep end. But I got better and realized I was severely burnt out, traumatized, I had undiagnosed and untreated OCD and autism. I wouldn't judge your younger self, you were scared and wanted help. But no one was offering it to you. So you took it into your own hands.
That entire first paragraph hit me directly at the heart. I feel you. And as for schizophrenia, when I began having some audio and olfactory hallucinations, I thought that was going to be my fate as well. Turns out, depression can do that to you (and many other things). I hope you're getting the help you need.
The "not listening to their patients" thing is SO important. A psych I went to talked to me for 2 hours and decided there wasn't enough evidence of childhood signs. Because she didn't ask for any. I could have given her all my old report cards but no. Though, my next psych didn't ask about those bodily kinds of things (like rashes) either.
"Psychiatric diagnosis have a way of piling up". Yes, but so do the comorbidities. I went from "only" having social anxiety starting with puberty, to depression as a resulting secondary disease and then piled substance abuse on top, which in the short term made the first two a bit more bearable (this is a bad thing, because it prevents people from seeking help), while in the long term worsening these conditions because they aren't being treated. You may then find yourself in a situation, where you have to dismantle that stack one by one, before you can even start tackling the core problem and it's likely that things will temporarily feel hopeless or even worse before they can get better. If you put in the work, they do eventually get better though.
Yes, and that's ultimately a large part of why I wound up being recommended schizoid personality disorder rather than autism spectrum disorder. I already had questionable diagnoses for both schizoaffective disorder and schizotypal personality disorder in the past. And, I didn't really interact enough with other children for the lack of connection to be obvious. And, ScPD and ASD are virtually identical other than the age of onset where in my case, I was a bit too old for ASD, but a bit too young for ScPD. I've also had a bunch of things that were comorbid to both.
The differential diagnosis part is so, so important. I went to a doctor thinking I had ADHD. I got a little chart, checked a lot of the boxes, and got sent to a psychiatrist. They instantly ruled out ADHD and I had to go back for an autism diagnosis instead. The reason I can't focus? Sensory issues. It's hard to focus when my brain can't block out any other stimuli. I think self-diagnosis is an important base, but it shouldn't be the final diagnosis
There is a major issue here, its that the psychiatrists also make a lot of wrong diagnostics. I noticed that autism, gifted spectrum and complex ptsd get way under diagnosed. It took me nearly 30 years to get the right diagnostic for those. I think a good diagnostic should be a team effort where we work together to test that diagnostic constantly, especially in the case of conditions resistant to treatment. I've been misdiagnosed as depressed, then bipolar disorder then diagnosis stoped altogether as no treatment worked( I ended up being highly neurodivergent and having severe complex ptsd) I had to look into it myself and learn by myself for years until I could find what was wrong. Then I went to my psychiatrist and got new case workers to remake a diagnosis and get help for the right stuff.
That's the tricky thing about mental illness vs autism. Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder that's there from birth while mental disorders like bipolar and ptsd are environmentally induced and can come and go throughout life, though symptoms often intertwine and autistic people usually have mental illnesses as well. This causes lots of confusion and misinterpretation with diagnostics.
@@Trahzy autism isn't a disorder by itself. It's a neurodivergence that causes social rejection as neurodivergence is poorly understood by the public at large causing conflicts, misunderstandings and discrimination, that in turn cause other anxiety related issues. Its a bit the same way having a darker skin is often accompanied with similar issues where they are a minority. The issues are not due to the initial state but the public reaction.
@@shorgoth Disorder, divergence, whatever it's just the way the brain develops and directly affects social interaction and many other functions from childhood onwards. Unlike mental illnesses which are entirely environmentally developed.
@@Trahzy a disorder would mean it is a "bad thing" while its normal and genetically created with its own set of pros and cons compared to neuronormative brains. What would stop most of the issues is social acceptance and understanding and branding it as a disorder does not do that, it perpetuates the idea that people with autistic traits need to be fixed. This is basically like beating children who use their left hand because it's "the hand of the devil" like they used to do instead of making left-handed scissors as we do now. This is why I make the distinction and it's an important one.
This! I just learned that the psych I saw for my ADHD diagnosis got it completely wrong, and it was all because he didn't validate the answers I gave on the assessment. I was one point short and he just went "nope it's not that". When talking to someone about it they asked me what I scored, so I redid it for them. They took one look at the fidgeting criteria that I'd marked as low and they said, "but you CONSTANTLY pick at your fingers!". I'd never considered it fidgeting, and if the doctor had paid attention during the consult he'd have noticed that I was doing it the entire time. Basically, if your patient is ONE point short surely it should be standard practice to validate some of their responses?!
Diagnosing is so hard. My cousin had depression like symptoms so her mother sent her to the psychiatrist, he gave her anxiety and depression disorder diagnosis and meds for it. But she only got worse, not only emotionally but physically. She couldn't stand from bed for weeks. After that, we decided to take her to an endocrinologist were she had hypothyroidism diagnosed. Started taking meds and after that she got better. Obviously stopped taking the antianxiolitics
That's awful, the psychiatrist first told me to get tested if I have a thyroid issue, and only then accepted to see me and diagnose me with an anxiety disorder. This gave me the impression that all psychiatrists do that beforehand, but I guess not.
I have known I was different for a long time. I just didn’t catch on to this mysterious “thing” that others seemed to be born with. There were people that seemed to know how to interact and I always felt like an outsider looking in. I used to describe it as people were born with a user/game manual that told them what all these hidden rules were and I didn’t get mine. I was scared to have kids because I never wanted them to feel like I did growing up. It was really lonely. I ended up having my daughter and I saw that she was struggling the same way I was. I took her to get evaluated by a psychologist and they said she had ASD. When I went through the home eval, everything I could check off for her, I could also apply to myself. I haven’t been officially diagnosed, but it’s nice to have a name to what I’ve felt. I may eventually, but now I have an explanation for being “the weird kid.”
I'm sorry I'm triggered with your post. I apologize in advance if I make you feel invalidated. As a fact: NOBODY IS BORN WITH USER MANUAL, N-O-B-O-D-Y. That said, being extremely ignorant about mental illness, I have heard that some people have the impossibility to learn certain things. I don't know that is a fact, but maybe that's the problem. I, having gone through the painful process of learning how to interact with people (and still missing a lot of road to walk), restate: NOBODY IS BORN WITH USER MANUAL
@@LucasDanielSantoro Autistic people are born without the glasses needed to read the manual same difference. If you are aggressively gonna shut down someone, at least have the decency not to spew BS. You are also missing the part where it's an analogy with the goal to convey a feeling. And last but not least, yes nobody is born without the manula, but the ones who provide the manual are the parents, and not every parent does that, and if your parents don't, then you definitely aren't gonna know what to fucking do.
@@LucasDanielSantoro The thing is ASD has a weird relationship with intelligence. I am actually diagnosed and fully aware how I differ from 'normal' people. This does not make me comfortable behaving their way fully, but it helps to 'fit' in compared to someone who isn't aware.
@@LucasDanielSantoro It sure as hell seems to me like most people are born with more of a user manual than I was. It's not an issue of "some people can't learn some things", it's "I'm different, I know it, you know it, everyone knows it, and because of that I'm an outsider and treated differently, poorly, for something I cannot control (trust me, I've tried to the point of giving myself cripplingly low self-esteem by constantly comparing myself and my complete ineptitude at social interaction and now never feel like I'm good enough for anything remotely social in nature) and did not choose." I am acutely aware of exactly how I am different, what others do that I don't, and what I do that others don't, but in trying to "correct" these things, all I end up doing is causing myself harm in many ways, and just making everyone else uncomfortable by just managing to fall straight into uncanny valley in my attempts at interaction. Good for you if you could overcome that and learning how to do those things. You are probably autistic as well but much better at masking than I am, not necessarily something to be proud of and definitely not something to use as ammunition to put others down and invalidate them like you are. But there very much were people born with that user manual. Or at least parts of it. Those people who are absolutely confident in themselves and those around them, who know how to navigate the interpersonal landscape that is modern society, and who seem to require exactly no effort to do so? The ones who often use those qualities to abuse and control others for personal gain, and seem to have a particular disdain for those of us who utterly lack any of that innate social acumen or had to learn it through hard work, and likely are able to recognize through logic what it is they're doing, and as a result are often resistant or even immune to their manipulations, with that likely being the reason for their disdain? Those are the people who were born with a user manual. "Regular" people got bits and pieces. Some only get a page or less. I got the front cover and nothing else. I know, and have always know, what it was I was missing relative to others. But seeing the cover of a book gives little away of the contents, and when that book is a guide on how to use something or put it together, the cover is so useless most instruction booklets simply don't have covers anymore. What I'm trying to say is, good for you that you can do social interaction. Don't use that to lord over the rest of us like you're better. You're not. And you're wrong. There *are* people who are born with that knowledge. Just because, like me, you aren't one does not mean those people don't exist.
@Lucas Santoro I find your comment completely invalidating and unnecessary. The OP simply stated her POV, and you told her she was wrong. As an autistic person who was late diagnosed, I second her POV. I'm not saying anyone had it easier or was actually given a user manual. I'm just saying that it felt like everyone else was given instructions on how to act, but I wasn't.
im self-diagnosed with ASD. my psychiatrist said i might have autism but then diagnosed me with BPD because im pretty social. even tho i have like 3 symptoms that match BPD and none of them BPD specific (self-harm, depressive episodes, anxiety). so i made my own research, read articles, read about peoples experience, reflected on my behavior (and figured out a few thinks i never thought abt before), asked my friends. autism is often misdiagnosed as BPD so im gonna bring all this up the next time i see my doctor and i think she will agree with me.
@@cca1834 i went to that psychiatrist a couple more times, she agreed that i might have autism but ignored the BPD topic completely. she suggested going to an ASD specialist but in that mental health center all of them were for children and costed 80usd+ for 1 appointment. i just didnt bother. then i switched to another specialist. new psychiatrist agreed that i do not have BPD and that i do have autistic traits. ive been re-diagnosed with PTSD, C-PTSD and generalized anxiety disorder.
@@giovannaputhumana8460 i went to that psychiatrist a couple more times, she agreed that i might have autism but ignored the BPD topic completely. she suggested going to an ASD specialist but in that mental health center all of them were for children and costed 80usd+ for 1 appointment. i just didnt bother. then i switched to another specialist. new psychiatrist agreed that i do not have BPD and that i do have autistic traits. ive been re-diagnosed with PTSD, C-PTSD and generalized anxiety disorder.
At 15 I was reasonably convinced I had Bipolar and ADHD I self medicated with massive caffeine doses in my last high school year. Got into uni, completely burned out, dropped out. Funked around for a few years developed drug addictions had a massive pyschotic episode and took myself to see a psychiatrist as a last resort (I had seen 4 others in the past and they were varying degrees of useless and unhelpful) my new shrink told me I was basically a textbook case of Bipolar and ADHD. Years later of various meds and I'm in a very good place but I'm still jaded about being told I was a stupid teenager for correctly assessing that my emotions and behaviour where not normal even for teenagers and I'm still jaded that I didn't have access to meds in school... Most people don't know how to asses themselves well but if something is wrong and you don't like your DRs opinion, find another doctor. By pure chance the psychiatrist I saw who specialised in drug addiction treatment is also one of only a few psychiatrists who specialises in adult ADHD as well and as such is one of only a very few doctors in my country that can and will prescribe stimulants.
They kept me away from adhd diagnosis because I told them I require Amphetamine to have a productive day. It may be 2 weeks between buying a bit to get the house back in order, because I now limit my use for that purpose. I had 10 years of taking every drug under the sun, but managed to shut the lid on all of them apart from speed. It never felt like a drug, just made me feel like what I perceived normal people to feel like. All the random GPs seemed to hear was I take drugs everyday to survive. It was only after seeing the same mental health guy at the clinic for three, 45 minute appointments that I actually got my point across, and a referral. I am now diagnosed.
as a medicine student i just want to say, that i'm so glad i found this channel so early on my way of becoming a doctor. You're pointing out really important things which were not covered during classes on uni. We're mainly focusing on all this scientific theoretic stuff (one course about comunication with patients is not really enough in my opinion, especially that time between it and moment when we'll graduate is like, more than 4 years) and some soft skills are kinda skipped because of the lack of time. I'm really glad i found someone who's mindset is so healthy and balanced, and can be a suggestion for me how i should think and behave as a professional health provider. I just feel like i can learn a lot from you sir, thank you for sharing your knowledge and giving me this opportunity
In my country it's very hard to get an autism diagnosis. When you are a child, doctors are afraid to tell your parents, because of a cultural stigma attached to psychiatry in general. Usually doctors see right away that something is "off" about me and give my mother a lot of autism literature to read, it's pretty obvious what they imply by that, but they can't be direct lol. Not having a paper has hurt me severely, I spent 3 months on medications I was in no way supposed to take specifically because of autism. I fit every single category in the dsm-5, my therapist believes I have autism, I have a lot of relatives who are very obviously autistic. I don't care if I can't drive a car or own a gun, heck, I SHOULD NOT DRIVE A CAR OR OWN A GUN. But because apparently those things are life ruining in some peoples eyes I can't have an official diagnosis, thanks.
@@ledumpsterfire6474 Tell that to the law makers TwT Also in my case I legit should be restricted in driving, a fork falling on the floor near me causes me to shut down and sometimes scream, and roads are very loud, an ambulance existing in my hearing range already causes me to close my ears... I have NOTHING to lose but because people are so afraid of psychiatry in my country I can't have the official diagnosis
@@adish1401 Sorry, I probably should've rephrased that it doesn't inherently make someone unfit. I'm diagnosed and do just fine in a car, but most of my sensory issues are touch related, sound doesn't bother me unless it's really sudden, loud, and/or prolonged. I get that others do have more impairing sensory issues that might make driving dangerous. Really, it should be handled on a case by case basis.
if you’re ok with asking, what country r u from? your comment reminds me of my country (korea) where autism is veryyy stigmatized, criminals here sometimes claim to have autism (not sure whether they actually do or don’t) and so when autism is mentioned they either think of a psychopath or someone who is severely autistic to the point they need a caretaker 😂
Mental health workers not listening... this is a very real problem. If I feel like I'm not being heard, I drop them. And I don't care what it is about. Just because you had an experience in one way doesn't mean you can contradict what I'm telling you that I feel. I'm confirmed diagnosed with recurring clinical depression/major depression whatever they call it now. Also, sever general anxiety disorder. But wait there's more. I jump at sharp, sudden, loud noise. I didn't used to do that. No one else in the room jumps, not even my jump scare prone wife. Without medication I have extreme nightmares and wake up yelling. I have a 0-120mph temper... without medication. Without medication I am literally afraid to go to sleep because of what happens there. Without medication I have suicidal ideation to the point that I did have a plan. I had a very detailed plan that would 100% end me with minimal pain, a short moment of panic, and no guns with a messy clean up. I knew where and when I would do this, and what the weather would have to be like so I could watch the clouds in the sky. Of course, at the time I told no one about this as I was getting help and I'm not fucking stupid enough to get institutionalized *against my will*. It was only after medication stopped the suicidal ideation almost completely that I told people exactly what the plan was and that the only thing I had to decide was whether to do it. I won't describe it here, because it would glamorize it, and people who don't know about it don't need to be taught about it. I have experienced lucid dreaming, and that's great when I trigger it, but it's not a guarantee. My dreams a extremely "real". I have smelled in my dreams. I see color in my dreams. I only feel pain in my dreams if I experience pain for some reason in the real world. One of the biggest triggers for lucid dreaming for me is if I get shot. I almost always realize I am dreaming at that point because I don't feel impact, I don't feel pain. I do feel like I'm dying, but once I realize nothing actually happened to me but an imagined bullet hole, I snap into lucid dreaming. I experienced repeated large traumas (close family/friend deaths) at regular intervals throughout my life. I was never abused, but my therapist suspects I was neglected emotionally, though I knew my parents/grandparents loved me. I sometimes have episodes that resemble a flashback. Rarely if ever would I call them an actual flashback, but I am unsure especially if my mind gets stuck in the past and I experience all the same emotions. If one were to put me against a checklist for CPTSD, I tick almost every box, but I have not been diagnosed with that. What I have learned is that therapists tend to be very biased against non-violent trauma, or non-abusive trauma. Doesn't matter if your whole fucking family died and everyone you ever loved left or died. I get the impression that society as a whole believe that people can't be permanently damage unless they were physically or violently attacked in some way. And that's fucking bullshit. I believe I suffer from learned helplessness. Google that. My psychiatrist suspects I have hypnogogic or hypnopompic hallucinations. So yeah. I'm pretty fucked up. And ultimately, any official diagnosis is irrelevant because I have so many overlapping issues. Any amount of stress can send me into fight/flight/freeze. Real danger, however, results in focus instead of panic. I am not autistic though I feel like I can related to a lot of autistic issues. I'm very empathetic toward those people. I'm not AD/HD but I can relate to their issues. Mental illness in a human being can't be shoved inside some pretty little box most of the time. It's complex and messy. That is all. So my self diagnosis is something akin to CPTSD. But as I said it doesn't matter because all of these mental illnesses or disabilities have overlap. The only real objective measure of severity is how well can you function in life, how much do you think about suiicde. I've been in the mental health treatment system for over 20 years now. I have enough experience to have an opinion. As of right now. I cannot preform activities of daily living. I just can't get it done. Regular personal hygiene, mundane housework, even paying bills is a fucking struggle and I have plenty of money. Traveling is a nightmare and I only do it for my daughter two or 3 times a year. So while I may not be able to diagnose myself without bias... I can certainly say that I am royally fucked up.
Took me a few years after high school to recognize my symptoms as depression and anxiety, and even longer to recognize my ADHD and how it exasperated the depression and anxiety. My life was pretty chaotic but when I was presented the information, everything kind of clicked and it lead me down the road of going back to school for my associates degree and finding a job with decent benefits. With health insurance, I was finally able to see a therapist and psychiatrist and was clinically diagnosed with all 3. It was such a weight off my shoulders to know that I wasn't just lazy or useless. I'm getting treatment and I'm now enrolled in school working towards my bachelor's. My life is in a far better place all because I took the time to recognize that my symptoms weren't normal, and then I did the research that would convince me to see a therapist. Would I call it a "self-diagnosis"? No. I didn't go around telling anybody I had anything until it was confirmed by my therapist. But to myself, I recognized how the symptoms aligned with each of the illnesses and presumed that I had all 3 until it was confirmed by my therapist and psychiatrist. I know how biases can play into these things so I was always open to the idea that a therapist might think it could have been something else or that there may have been other additional overlapping diagnoses. I just happened to be right.
As a first year psychology student I got good grades but it felt so hard and easy things like conversations and shopping were hard. So it was evident that it wasn’t a lack of intelligence or trying. I did research and adhd seemed very likely as all my life I have been told just focus. I did get evaluated by a psychiatrist and got the diagnosis. I often hear people saying that they only have one symptom and based on this symptom it’s adhd or after a certain amount of time they can’t focus so they have adhd.
i self diagnosed with autism a year before i could get my diagnosis. i knew people with autism, i read through all the diagnostic criteria and compared to other things i thought explained my problems previously (depression, anxiety & social anxiety, HSP (highly sensitive person)) and just ignored the problems i couldn’t explain (through all my time in therapy all the questions i got were confusing and i usually couldn’t give an answer unless my therapist helped to break down the question, give me options, ect.). but when doing my full dive into autism all those other options just merged together into one, clear thing that could explain everything. but to be really fair before i ever started therapy i was given a strange little paper that apparently was a pre-test for an autism diagnosis that was ignored after they said “you could have autism ngl”. so i’m positive about self diagnosis, as long as you’re open to other explanations, incredibly long research that doesn’t only consist of using the internet and try in any way to discuss it with a professional.
@@SynthApprentice Especially with autism since a lot of us tend to hyperfocus on things and finding out stuff about myself tends to send me into a deep dive into various subjects just because they're interesting... Though that of course would only apply to those who would self-diagnose more accurately in this case in the first place, so that doesn't **really** tell a lot about the general accuracy of self-diagnosis. I just wish everyone was interested in doing research into things potentially affecting themselves and those near them (not only behavior but identity-wise as well), would save a lot of unnecessary stigma overall.
With mental illness it's probably a lot harder than physical ones, but i would say it's still valid. Even such a simple and pretty common thing as asthma i had to diagnose myself at age 18, mainly because i always had allergies and bad breathing always attributed to that. But when i had an episode while sick with pneumonia and almost suffocated to death, that scared the sh*t out of me, and made me do my research and find a solution. It still took way longer than than i thought it should to get officially diagnosed, but at least now i can get correct treatment and know how to not get into potentially dangerous situations because i know what do avoid.
What's frustrating to me is that I don't and have never functioned like those around me. I always thought it was... just my personality. However, when you have a lifetime of trying to do things that should be fairly easy and coming up short, you come to realize tha there's something off. Yet, because I've learned to mimic certain behaviors (for a short period of time anyway)... people are quick to say "nothing is wrong." However, I can only mimic normalcy for a short period of time and it's usually because I start things with a level of enthusiasm that dies out quickly, and so in order to maintain any sense of functionality I am constatanly starting over again. That means constantly moving, constantly switching jobs, constantly needing something new in order to do stuff effectively because once that enthusiasm dies out, I can no longer hyper focus on doing a great job, and soon it becomes mentally and physically impossible to do it anymore. A ton of people think it's just me being lazy and/or not caring, like I'm doing it on purpose... but I always fight hard to do better and try as I may this thing in me overrides what I want. During the pandemic I've done a lot of research on ADHD, and also read experiences from people who've been diagnosed with it since childhood and their life experiences read exactly like mine. I'm convinced I have ADHD and my psychiatrist is finally starting to consider this after a year of working with her. However, I am open to other possibilities...I really am, but what's frustrating is when a recent nuerologist just dismissed all my claims upon just looking at me and said, "There's nothing wrong with you" before even conducting a test. While I might not have the exact diagnosis right, this idea that this lifelong struggle is just nothing was disheartning given how hard I work to be "normal," an do every day tasks. I think experiences like this is what causes people to self-diagnsis. If you're living in your body and moving about in the world, you get a sense of whether or not something is wrong because there's data that stems from yourself, but also the data all around you... you might not understand what or why, but you understand there's something.
I also want to add that I landed on ADHD after ruling out a few other possibilities. I actually didn't even consider ADHD even though it kept showing up on searches because I had this stereotype of what an ADHD person behaved like... but with a deep-dive learned that there's a lot more to the condition, and that inattentive adhd looks way different from the more well-known symptoms of hyperactive adhd.
@@QueenSoap I've struggled to hold down a job my entire life because I always go through the cycle of mimicking normalcy for a few months and then I run out of the capacity to do it. I'm super enthusiastic and hardworking during the initial few months and almost everyone considers me one of the best workers. Then it becomes harder to pretend to be normal and i start feeling a sense of doom. I start dreading going to work every minute of my day and fall into a depressive episode. At that point, I can no longer smile, my face muscles won't do what I tell them to. People notice my behaviour is different. Then I quit the job and I need a couple months before I can get back my ability to act normal.
I think that it's totally fine to say that you might have this or that mental illness but aren't diagnosed officially. Especially since it's really hard for a lot of people to seek mental health treatment because of price or availability. I'm fortunate enough to live in Germany where seeing a psychiatrist/therapist is free but you often have to wait months and months until you finally get into therapy.
Yes, I do wonder how many people would be self-diagnosed if diagnosis was easier to get. The only reason that I self-diagnose as autistic is that the diagnostic criteria were pretty well screwed up and there was only classical autism when I was a child. But, the psychologist thought that I've probably got Schizoid Personality Disorder, which despite its name implying schizophrenia, it's virtually identical to what used to be referred to as Asperger's Syndrome and the two names have often been used interchangeably at different times. I've got a bunch of additional testing to do to try and settle things for good, but it's a massive problem as self-diagnosis doesn't bring treatment or legal rights, and the diagnosis that I could get doesn't cover me for any of the stuff that I would benefit from treating.
Generally speaking mood disorders are much easier to recognise by the sufferer. It’s the personality disorders with other severe comorbid conditions where it becomes more challenging. The person with chronic feelings or anxiety and/or depression does not really need to be given a rubber-stamp by a clinician to know in and of themselves how they feel. Take two conditions often confused: bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder. Both are characterised by mood volatility and impulsivity, but with some basic research it’s easily to delineate the most distinctive features of each, particularly as the latter is concerned with identity disturbance (chronic, not episodic) and deeply ingrained abandonment anxiety/ paranoia. The trouble is that sometimes someone with a personality disorder may lack self-awareness, and therefore fail to recognise themselves as having a particular condition, or people tend to oversimplify by saying they are “depressed” when in fact this may be a symptom of a more complex condition.
I was living with my mom when I got diagnosed as a kid. She told my dad when she gave me to him to live with, but he did nothing about it. Someone in my family told me I grew out of it cause I’m “chill”, so I never thought about it cause I just thought that’s how it was. Fast forward to now, I’ve been doing a lot of research to find out what exactly is wrong with me. But nothing was really making sense. One day at work, I thought to myself “oh I was diagnosed with ADHD. I’m not hyper or anything anymore, might as well look into that.” It left me crying in the bathroom. My life could be so much different if my dad side of the family took it more seriously. I told my aunt I have adhd and got diagnosed as a kid, first thing she said was, “so you self diagnosed” lol
I self diagnosed myself with ADHD because I did the research and went to my general practitioner for an Adderall prescription. Turns out I was diagnosed officially when I was 12 and my mother chose not to take the doctors advice. I'm 34 now and just now finding happiness. I've got an official diagnosis appointment with the VA next week. I probably know more about my condition than my therapist will. Hyperfocus is a super power sometimes
I live in a rural neighborhood and have been on a waiting list of a psychiatric assessment for a year. Though I understand the importance of proper diagnosis, I think what needs to be addressed is also mis-diagnosis. Mis-diagnosis is an issue nearly all my friends have struggled with. I had a friend who got sent ot of the hospital twice because they did blood tests on them, said they were fine and their pain was just anxiety, and sent them on their merry way. Turns out, their blood tests showed that they were in the midst of passing a gallbladder stone, and after weeks of forcing themselves back into the hospital, turns out they had a severe hernia as well! Two other friends of mine got diagnosed with ADHD and anxiety, none of the medications they were giving were working, and after arguing with their family doctors to try and convince them that their medication isn't working, turns out both of them actually had autism. Finally, my little sister once tried to talk to my family doctor about getting an evaluation for mental illness, and my family doctor essentially said "well, you don't looked mentally ill so I don't see a reason to send you to a specialist." These things actually happen. Medical gaslighting and mis-diagnosis happens all. the. time. So, in a world where information is at out fingertips, it is important to be a health advocate for yourself. I haven't been properly diagnosed with ADHD, but I have done a heck of a lot of research, and will continue to use the resources I found that actually help me. I haven't been diagnosed with OCD, but a lot of OCD resources have helped me with my crippling intrusive thoughts. I spent most of 2021 in and out if hospitals trying to figure out what is wrong with certain parts of my body, and no doctor was able to give me an answer. Everything looks "normal," and thus, no one wanted to give me solutions. I found those solutions on my own (and with the one physiotherapist in my town that actually cares about my health and wellbeing,) that work, and make me happy and healthy and will continue to use them despite there being no "doctor approval. I encourage EVERYONE to be health advocates for themselves, and take advantage of the resources you have, especially with you are like me and my friends, who live in rural places with shitty doctors and understaffed hospitals with ambulances that take approx 1½ hours to arrive at your door on average.
I self dxed with autism. I was advised to get tested multiple times by my pediatrician as a kid but my parents never tested me. Now I’m an adult and getting tested is extremely expensive. But my whole life I haven’t really understood the way other people communicate and I have only been close friends with neurodivergent people. I also have very intense interests, and weak sensory processing. I don’t think I have ADHD because I can focus quite well and have okayish executive functioning.
He gave some concrete examples of conditions that cause lack of focus, but that would be super hard to do with a life history of: sensory processing problems (sensitivity to sounds, touch, light); overstimulation; difficulty in social relationships that date back to childhood, strong interests of bordering on obsessive, etc etc. I'd be open to thinking that there is anohter way to explain all that!! I never saw an autism professional, as they were super expensive decades ago ( and not starting at my age). They were thousands of dollars back then. It actually has been helpful to me, not beating myself for being a certain way, and having more patience.
Probably one of the reasons why self diagnosis is so important for people (including me) ist the fact that getting a diagnosis at all takes ages if there’s so few psychiatrists and therapists in a country. I’m recently self diagnosed myself with adhd (unattentive type) because I have most of the symptoms in a pretty severe form. I remember those symptoms all my life until now. Unfortunately, getting an appointment for a diagnosis seems to take at least a year in Germany. Likely even longer. Though before that I have yet to find a psychiatrist who doesn’t decline me, so add another few months on top of that year. So for the time being, self diagnosis is all I have.
And sometimes getting official diagnosis is impossible altogether, so self diagnosis is all you can get. Hate it when some prick online tells people to go see a doctor or their experience is invalid when they would love to, but they can't...
@@andollpony2227 Yeah, that‘s unfortunately the case. Especially because self diagnosing can actually lead to better understanding of yourself if done properly (by properly looking at any disorder that you could have and reflection on the past, including old documents). I might have VERY good luck here, because I got an appointment extremely early, though that‘s not the case for everyone in Germany. Now I just have to hope that the diagnostic process works out to get the help I need.
From TikTok content I pursued an ADHD diagnosis and instead got PTSD. I was upset at first but am thankful because I feel like I was able to seek out specialized advice for my needs. Even though your channel is ADHD focused I do feel like it's helped me a lot with my inner voice. You and Dr Kirk Honda.
I self diagnosed with ASD about 6 months ago. I feel like if i mention it, i wont be believed because people will assume i watched a couple of videos and read an article when in reality ive been binge watching and reading everything i can on ASD while also asking my family and thinking on my childhood behaviours and habits. Ive even gotten second opinions going over the DSM5 with relatives because i often doubt my own conclusions. I often think that i cant have ASD, but i have so many traits and habbits associated with it. Its kind of become my special interest. I have everything id need shprt of a written accoumt to get a proper diagnosis except a doctor who diagnosis ASD in adults(very hard to find in my country), and enough money to pay for it. Getting an ASD diagnosis can be expensive. In any case my self diagnosis has helped understand my habbits and behaviours to let me live a healthier and better life. Id like to get a proper diagnosis, but as stated it would be very difficult. I dont need very much help either, id likely be "high functioning" so a diagnosis atm wouldnt really help much. I am also self employed, so that helps a lot.
"ive been binge watching and reading everything i can on ASD" -> Be careful to not fall into confirmation bias. You need to try and research alternatives as well. Try to ask yourself those two questions : "What symptoms do I have that would specifically contradicts ASD diagnosis?" and "What are some other diagnostics/conditions that could also cover the symptoms I experience?". Try to stay attached more to the symptoms and less to the actual diagnostic. That said, what you said about understanding yourself is still spot-on. Even if the diagnostic could be incorrect, the symptoms are there, and you have to deal with them. Understanding the symptoms better is nothing but useful!
Keep your feelings or symptoms in a journal. Also include the date, time of day, and when you take any medications. Then, note what you did that day. This is so you can say "I'm mad and feeling depressed" and check your notes to see what else might have caused it. Like watching a lot of news, or social media. Finally share your journal with your doctor. Your consistency and persistence hopefully will inspire them to take everything you say seriously, and you have evidence.
I have never been set in stone with my own self-diagnosis (physical and mental), I still want professional ones. But I am glad to know I did do the right thing and sort through differential diagnosis. I am in an odd situation where it's really really not easy for me to get help, so for 16 years or so I've been trying to research what I can and learn my own self to at least function. I focus more on symptoms than assuming I have one disorder or the other too. It probably doesn't help that I slowly lost trust and faith in the help I did seek out either. No one really seemed to want to sit down and care, and that's on being unlucky and finding all the wrong people.
I appreciate you acknowledging that many Drs are not listening to their patients and can be arrogant. Not many would admit this and it is a real problem many are experiencing and as a result are losing trust and hope in the medical professionals they are trying to work with.
I’m an LCSW and this would be an excellent lecture for a course on diagnosis. I wish the public understood better the difference between a symptom and a diagnosis. Anxiety is common, and all healthy people have it as a protective mechanism. Anxiety disorders refer to an excess of anxiety symptoms that cause impairment of life functions. Similar things can be said about depression, dissociation, and narcissism.
I diagnosed myself with adhd because corona crashed our psychiatric system …and the few adhd docs in southern Germany just take new patients if you pay 500-800€ 😂 my brain never worked “normal” but I ignored some psychiatrists in the past with their diagnosis, because I misunderstood adhd completely… I’m so happy that my digital depression and deep diving lead me to adhd content like yours! I’m very thankful I feel like seeing light again😊🎉
Most people cannot diagnose themselves because they simply do not know enough. Even those with the knowledge can not see themselves clearly enough to diagnose accurately. Outside perspective is essential, especially when it comes to matters of the mind, especially disorders of the mind. That said, mental health professionals do need to be aware that there are some patients who actually ARE incredibly well-informed and have enough insight to actually get it right. If you're a psychiatrist and only have 20 minutes to give a patient, that rare patient may actually be able to do you job better than you. If you gave them a full hour to ask the right questions, to take an adequate history, to discuss past responses to meds, you might actually be able to see this.
I've kinda thought I had ASD or ADHD, but then I had mentioned something after several sessions to the mental health professional that is provided through my university. Well this one crucial detail about my bodily growth/development through puberty put a whole other perspective on my symptoms. He was able to pinpoint my issues to a syndrome that can have severe impacts on hormones and bodily development. Sure enough after a blood test we find that my body produces almost no testosterone at all. I'm not in a position to financially pursue this as much as I need to because I go to university so most of my money is spent on school. It's still possible for me to have something like ASD but it will be difficult to tell until after I get the biological issues tackled.
I feel it's important to note that you didn't set your mind on it, you were questioning, and then the medical professional did the correct steps after you expressed your questions.
I think you have to self diagnose these days to get decent health care, because if you don't all the doctors give you are the basic, most common 'causes/treatments'. I was going to the doctors for years about memory and cognitive issues and they just kept putting it down to stress or burnout despite it never really diminishing. It wasn't until I started doing my own research and walked in saying "it's either early onset dementia or ADHD" that they even got considered. Still took some convincing but I at least started to get referrals
This, is the sad truth. 100%. And if you think you might have a mental illness, go see a doctor who SPECIALIZES in that illness or you will go NOWHERE.
For a really long time i tought i might have ADHD because of short atention span etc. Reading about it on internet and watching some videos (tiktok is a plague of false information), so recently i decided to see a psychiatrist and she told half way in on visit that shes 100% sure i don't have ADHD but I do have neurosis caused by depression and it hit me like a truck, but when she explained everything made sense. So yeah being able to self diagnose some symptoms might point you in the right direction or at least going to check it with specialist like in my case. After all i am happy i went there and i know what i have to do to get better :)
Big issue with the diagnostic process is also doctors who have knowledge gaps and don’t have enough awareness to recognize that a patients issue might be concerning something they’re not too knowledgable about. I have multiple times throughout my life been in assessment situations over things that were in hindsight very obviously related to my adhd, even spending years in threrapy on two occasions for comorbid depression and for emotional dysregulation in my adulthood and still had to diagnose myself after having a friend tell me “hey, you should do research on adhd, your struggles sounds like adhd” and then spent years pursuing a diagnosis going from doctor to doctor to find a way to get assessed during corona. My therapist and me were edging close to the idea I might have bpd because of how my adhd manifested during a very toxic and messy relationship and it never occured to him to send me to get assessed for adhd because barely anyone even knows adhd has an emotional side at all. Another friend of mine actually was misdiagnosed with bpd for years before finding out she had adhd. With some diagnoses, self dx is not just helpful, it’s also often necessary to getting an official diagnosis at all unless you’re extremely lucky. Where I live (germany) I think getting an adhd diagnosis as an adult without self dx’ing is pretty much straight up impossible.
I was diagnosed as a child and I still feel like an imposter sometimes. My diagnosis did help, it got the conversation started on how to take care of the problems I faced. However, the problem I found was people who didn't know how to help would get aggrevated with me not being able to do my work or asking for help. They would ask me in an aggressive tone what I needed to complete the task and my brain would shut down. This escalated the problem and eventually they would reach a point of threatening me with disciplinary action until it finally reached the point where they would threaten to call my parents. To me that meant I was about to be abused. I would then fill with energy and aggression and burst out in a long and seemingly thought out explanation of the issues I face. These were never succesful, and usually just lead to the teacher getting defensive and justifying their actions. Then I go to the office, where it doesn't matter what caused the problem, they ignore that and focus on the fact that I dared to escalate the arguement with a teacher. All that leads to people ignoring the source of the problem and then I end up trapped in a cycle of abuse and mistreatment.
I self diagnosed ADHD. Later got 2 separate tests confirming it. However there was another tricky little bug at play that my doctor misdiagnosed that I correctly diagnosed. Not her fault, she didn't have all the information. I was diagnosed with depression. I actually have CPTSD. I felt like depression just didn't fit. I looked and looked into depression and even took the antidepressants for a couple days and I was just like no. I don't fit this criteria. I don't check a quarter of the boxes that would give me the diagnosis of depression. I didn't feel down. I sleep fine (when my ADHD or my baby aren't keeping me awake) I don't have loss of interest in things. I had emotional dysregulation from trauma. My entire life I've had it. It causes me to have some shame spirals when I would have a moment that hurt those around me. That's fucking human. If I didn't feel shame you better call me a sociopath. (honestly not sure that's the correct term for someone that would just go around hurting people with no regrets lol)
These videos are so helpful! Thanks for putting it out for free. I wish medicine had an entire person diagnosis. It is SO hard to find doctors who are interested in diagnosing multiple seemingly unrelated issues.
Having a doctor that will listen to your worries is so important. It took me years to get my thyroid problems diagnosed because I also happen to have a previous diagnosis of mdd. My old doctor would always just refuse to even do the proper tests. Sometimes changing to a better doc can absolutely be what you might need to do in such situations.
As a kid and teen, my speech, learning, and socializing struggles were considered a part of my premature birth. 5 years ago, after struggling after college, I learned about autism, realized that was what I was, and learned how to self-help. A few months ago, I got my official diagnosis from a mental health professional. Learning I am autistic was one if the most wonderful things that has happened to me. I finally started learning how to be me.
When I was a kid, a teacher had said to my mom that I might be autistic but she didn't even consider it a possibility apparently... Years later I find out about that (casually mentioned in a conversation about childhood) and I went into looking into it and found out my personality fit very well into what was considered autistic traits back then... But I still kinda thought "that's just my personality" because I was taught all my life that it's a "horrible thing to be" and all the other bigoted stuff about it... ...I am still kinda bitter about it because my life has just constantly been shit all the time. I only learned to start accepting it a few years ago and only recently been more interested in researching it more intensely and taking officially used tests and looking for more content from autistic people - it's made my life a little bit easier but my whole family also has this adverse reaction to self-diagnosis. And I already have a kind of bad experience with medical staff in addition to hearing all the shit autistic people have had to go through with the system so I'm not exactly keen to go get diagnosed... I'll still ask, do you think it's worth it? Did it help you to get an official diagnosis in any way, and what kind of experience did you have getting it? (If you don't mind talking about it of course)
Autism is just a developmental disorder, it's not the only one. I'm glad you were able to get a proper diagnosis. But, the other options probably wouldn't have made much of a difference in terms of treatment as it's mostly treating the traits that are causing issues in any case.
in my case all healthcare professionals have always been yapping about autism to me BECAUSE of my premature birth 💀💀in spite of me never relating to any of the symptoms 🙄 i was going to get an adhd evaluation, but then they decided to switch it to an autism evaluation without my input because "oh you're premature, how come you've never gotten this evaluation before!". the result was no autism, but "probably ADD". yeah i fucking thought so!
My disorders are profesionally diagnosed. But I couldn't have got there without learning about my condition on my own and knowing how to tackle it. Part of my trauma is iatrogenic from childhood psych, and I could never have gone back to psychology/psychiatry without a game plan. I avoid the phrase "self-diagnosis" in favor of "pre-diagnosis." A person is competent to describe their symptoms. A person is competent to make comparisons between those symptoms and other people's, and then go to their doctor and go, "I think I have W because X, Y, and Z." And even if they don't have W, they still have X, Y and Z and still need care. If it gets them into the doctor and helps them start addressing the problem it's only a good thing. The danger is when someone never involves professionals, and especially when they then go and try and play doctor to other people. It quickly festers into a bunch of people not getting the care they need, doing unproven or unsafe self-treatment and the propagation of misinformation online.
Self diagnosis can be harmful since you can attribute symptoms to normal behaviors, but can be helpful if your parents don’t want to help you accessing a mental health professional, like when I had depression and trauma as a child, I wish I could have had help at that time because I was almost suiciding myself, I never diagnosed myself because I was seeking attention but because I really had something, that’s what’s matter, nowadays I know I have mild depression and delusional disorder with hallucinations.
Before I was diagnosed, I was pretty sure I had ADHD, but held that it *could be* a bunch of other things presenting like ADHD. However, I didn't need a diagnosis to benefit from using similar strategies to people with ADHD to help manage the issues I was having with inattention and organization, because even if I didn't have the disorder, I did still struggle with organization. You don't need a diagnosis to help yourself manage the symptoms you're experiencing, but you just can't get to the root of it on your own. I understand that it really fucking sucks that not everyone has access to Drs, especially a good psychiatrist, but that's an unfortunate reality of the world we live in and it doesn't make selfDX "valid" in any way.
Actually with sensory processing disorder it’s not easy to manage without professional help and some conditions require physical help. Like POTs and etc. if I have a fainting disorder or etc it’s not so easy to do that by myself. There’s also physical disabilities to take into consideration and sometimes it’s impossible to take care of a person without psychiatric or physical help.
And anything with hallucinations, like schizophrenia really needs professional help. Some people are unsafe without medicine that can only be prescribed by doctors.
Gosh, I wish my doctors were like you. I was diagnosed with ADHD but lately I've been questioning the diagnosis and this video really seals my thoughts on it, that it's likely been something else this whole time
Same. It's frustrating because I've tried a couple different times to get a diagnosis for whatever is wrong with my head and I keep getting different answers. First it was dyslexia (I can read just fine), then it was ADHD (I'm really not that disorganized and a few of the other symptoms don't really fit). In fact, a huge part of my focus issue turned out to simply be tied to poor hearing, because the harder it is to hear something the more your brain has to devote itself to figuring out what pieces of the sound you missed and trying to fill in those blanks. This is why I'd have a huge problem paying attention to long lectures, but almost no issue at all if I could read subtitles.
I have friends who self diagnosed themselves with DiD and I thought I had it too because I'm was struggling with a lot of imaginary friends as coping mechanism. I was later on diagnosed with ADHD and persistent depressive disorder which I finally was able to work on with my psych and therapist. My dependence on the imaginary friends was lifted and it wasn't DiD. Be careful with self diagnosis especially in extreme disorders like DiD or schizophrenia because it will change people's perspective with themselves for the worse and it will not help them in the long run to get the correct diagnosis and treatment
with DID especially, I created a headmate (dude as it likes to be called) intentionally (the practice is paromancy/tulpamancy/thoughtforms/imaginary friends considered sentient), and I can imagine that if someone diagnosed themselves with DID wrongly they could easily create headmates similarily to how I did only unintentionally. This could make them more sure that they have DID, and potentially harm them since plurality isn't for everyone and having the wrong diagnosis is also bad. Basically, I agree that one(or multiple on the topic of plurality/lh) should definitely be very careful when diagnosing themselves with stuff like that, since the brain can easily create symptoms.
this is exactly the problem I've had when trying to "figure out" what I have, there's so much overlap in the symptoms between so much different stuff that you can't know just by checking 3 boxes that you *have* that certain thing, it might be insightful to be aware of the symptoms, but you can't pinpoint the root cause without a differential currently deciding to go to therapy and eventually a diagnosis to have more answers and construct a way to work *with* it
I ended up being right in the end about having schizophrenia when I found out about it entirely by accident and then I didn't even realize I had half the other crap going on from it until I got in treatment and got help that everyone in my personal life was fighting against me with getting.
About 5 months ago, I self diagnosed myself with AvPD (Avoidant Personality Disorder). I tried for a good 2 months to get a legitimate diagnosis, but gave up when wait times kept extending, and appointments just kept falling through. At first, I wanted a second opinion to be sure that focusing on AvPD would be smart way of moving forward in therapy, but then I realized it doesn't actually matter. The reason I know I have AvPD is because even if somehow I technically didn't, it's such a useful and predictive model of my behavior and my complex patterns of anxiety that it doesn't even matter if it's "legitimate", it's just too helpful. I think one of the most telling signs that a self diagnosis is legitimate is if the diagnosis is a shockingly useful way of re-framing how you view your behavior, and if you'd be talking about all the same things even if it wasn't "legitimate".
I mean this is a lot like how we understand Physics. Does Newtonian Physics really cover all aspects of reality down to a quantum level? Does it cover general relativity? Not really. However, it's predictive enough to be useful. That said, getting a deeper diagnosis might be even more insightful and might open a path to treatment.
People with a super, SUPER rare AvPD disorder don't self-diagnose themselves for obvious reasons, nor do they try to get diagnoses. This is just hypocritical and contradicts all of it. The only thing that has "improved" with your mindset is Munchausen linear thinking.
@@bunille You're not there to be intellectually honest in any way and it obviously shows. Look at you making a random diagnosis for someone you don't know, thinking you're better and gonna convince anyone. Absolutely pathetic and hypocritical as can be. Hopefully you grow out of that phase.
I mean, I'm a psychology graduate, I'm more than aware what harm armchair-diagnosing can do. But I'm fluent in reading and understanding research studies. When I was 12, I was diagnosed through official channels to have DCD. Now as an adult in my 30s, I am certain that I have ADHD in addition to DCD, and it got missed when I was younger. Women and girls with adhd are notoriously underdiagnosed, and DCD and ADHD have several overlapping symptoms and are frequently comorbid, so it would hardly be a surprise either. There's also no way in hell I'm coughing up £900 for someone to tell me what I already know, at least not right now, during an economic crisis. At least I can take the steps to try and help myself in my disaster of a life 😅 I think if you are already well-informed by doing all the reading and it's not something that urgently requires external help and treatment, there's no harm in self-diagnosis.
This is why I do a few things when I self diagnose. First off, I don’t brag about my potential disorders. I don’t say “I have this and this and that” because I don’t know 100% weather I do or not, and even when someone asks or brings it up, I don’t say “I have x” I say something like “I might have x” or “I have many symptoms of x”. Second, I always do months of research on all of the symptoms, what disorders those symptoms could be shared with and try to rule out the possibilities instead of jumping to a conclusion. I would love to get a professional opinion on the conclusions I’ve made about myself and my mental illness(es) but I’m a minor living with a single mom and we’re struggling to stay out of debt. America doesn’t really have all that adorable options for diagnoses, so for now official diagnosis is kinda just a hopeful thought for the future 😅 Thank you for helping spread this information because I love learning about things like this and I have a feeling you’ll be on my TH-cam recommended a lot more often now
I found your comparison between MDD and Hyporthyroidism interesting as someone who's been diagnosed with both. And presumably for me it is both, since I have blood tests consistent with Hypothyroidism and symptoms of MDD even when blood tests are brought to normal levels with medications.
After 20 some years of accepting what my family told me and being on my own and dealing with so called ADHD i got introspective and questioned every aspect of my life down to intentions and emotions of actions and im a firm believer i never had adhd but High functioning BPD or quiet bpd i watched 3 different vidoes within a month and actually cried each video i watched.
I self diagnosed myself with depression because I have had multiple intrusive suicidal thoughts for years and constantly had a hard time getting out of bed and doing simple tasks. I didn't know what it was when I was really young but I always knew something was wrong and when I finally found out the word for it, I dugged deeper and I found out the reason and the cause of it. And honestly it helped me because I started developing coping mechanisms and practices really early. It's still a struggle for me, but at least I know how to keep myself safe. It doesn't always work so I still have to really fight myself. But it does help me even if only a little because getting help is really difficult where I am because the topic of mental health is still very much taboo and it's too expensive to keep going to a therapist. Hell, some of them are major creeps and totally ignore boundaries. I am about 99% sure it is depression but I'm not sure which type I fall under or if it is the only mental illness that I have because at this stage of my life, I have no idea what it feels like to have a normal healthy brain. I barely feel any emotions most days that I even wonder if I am truly happy about something or if I've just gotten too used to faking a smile or going along with the crowd so I don't stand out as the only one who could not react.
I began to strongly suspect I have ASD. The more I researched, the more it made sense. However, being a middle-aged adult, it wasn't easy to find a psychologist who worked with adults. Even my therapist couldn't recommend anyone. I finally found one, and even with insurance, it cost me over $2,200 out-of-pocket. This is one of the biggest challenges in trying to get professionally diagnosed. However, after a full evaluation and hours of testing, I was diagnosed with ASD and Alexithymia (which I had never heard of, but made sense once I read up on it). Thankfully, I was privileged enough to be able to afford this, but so many others can't. Self-diagnosis might to happen as often if it wasn't so expensive to see the specialists needed for the appropriate diagnosis.
I had undiagnosed mental illness for years... I wish I'd self-diagnosed, because then I might have actually taken steps to manage it instead of having it negatively affect a significant portion of my life. But, then again, I didn't want something to be wrong with me. I just wanted to live a healthy, productive life. I definitely was one of those who found getting a diagnosis to be liberating, not only because it explained myself to me, but also because once I had a concrete understanding of what was wrong with me, I could formulate a plan for managing it, and now I have a healthy, normal life outside of maybe a few bad days now and then, which everyone has to deal with. There's a difference between people who self-diagnose because they recognise something is wrong with them, and people who self-diagnose because they WANT something to be wrong with them (who are basically narcissists). The first kind are people who might be wrong in their diagnosis, but they're correct in understanding that something is wrong. Also, you can really go a long time thinking that you're normal, then you hear people talk about living with mental illness or disorders or neurodivergent conditions and realize that they sound so much like your day-to-day life. I remember watching Trash Taste, and Garnt was recently diagnosed with ADHD as an adult, which he never suspected until he heard someone with ADHD discuss all their coping strategies for managing ADHD, and realized that he did so many of the same things, which he just thought were normal. It can be hard, if you've developed coping strategies your whole life, to understand that's not how everyone else lives their life. But the key is someone who doesn't want to be special or unique or get sympathy for having something "wrong" with them will always seek a diagnosis from a professional.
as someone who is extremely financially challenged, i completely agree that self diagnosis is not ok. it’s also just not fair that people can become whatever issue they feel is quirky enough, and gain all the “benefits” without going through those struggles. as someone with bpd and schizoaffective, it’s so tiring seeing people just randomly become these things from day to night
What I typically do is to reframe myself by saying what I feel right now instead of creating an identity or a truth of being mentally ill. For example I will say I feel depressed today for no reason, instead of saying that I have depression. Or I would say that I feel socially anxious when I'm with crowds or strangers, instead of saying that I have social anxiety. Typically frame it in its situational or momentary presence instead of something permanently tied to yourself. Because, although it can be misleading to self-diagnose, I believe it's still important to put into words the complex and often intense emotions that you go through. I live in a country where there aren't any therapists and any mental health help I want to pursue are usually the kind that would also offer medication, which I would like to avoid as much as possible to avoid dependancies, so this is how I frame myself while I can't be officially diagnosed.
I do want to say, thank you for making this video. I have pretty complicated and difficult to diagnose health problems, and have seen doctors all my life, and I have a lot of fear around going to the doctor now because of my experiences. But I need to go back. I haven’t been able to because I’m so stuck in this fear of being misunderstood and blown off by doctors. I’ve even been accused of malingering when I show up having done some research. Hearing a bit about how doctors think and make diagnoses has really helped me. I think this will help me present my research, findings, and experiences to my next doctor in a way that’s respectful but also strong.
Personally I would really appreciate to be taught how to deal with the arrogant doctors who tell me I am healthy even though I complain about pain for over 20 years. What to tell them to actually make them listen to me. Also how to present my own hypotheses about my diagnoses.
No doctor will ever know me better than I know me. After my gf was diagnosed with ADHD, I did a lot of reading and research over a year before finally accepting that it seemed that I had all the symptoms of it too and decided to seek help. However, it's been a nightmare because of how dismissive every professional I've seen is and how outdated their knowledge is. I honestly feel like I know more about ADHD than the doctors I've seen (regardless of whether I actually have it). I've been told things like it's impossible for me to have ADHD as adult because I was never diagnosed as a child, or because I got mostly good grades. These are DOCTORS who specialize in this area! It's unbelievable how poor the overall quality of care is when it comes to mental health.
I assume you are probably a but more innatentive looking comparing to the typical adhd dudes. Its very hard for makes to get the "add"/adhd diagnosis. Even though its underdiagnosed in woman i think the more innatentive type is just generally going more undiagnosed more in men.
@@cringeweebooo60 I haven't seen anybody talk about this, but it seems obvious, doesn't it? Inattentive symptoms are more subtle than hyperactive symptoms; it's very easy to make yourself look like you're paying attention even if you haven't processed a single word someone's saying.
I was getting skeptical looks because I was a good student with good grades. Because I could sit in chair and nobody was complaining about me but for me I got severe social anxiety and didn't want to draw attention to me even as child.
@@Chrokosaur It doesn't help that a lot of the evaluations are written with hyperactive adhd in mind. I had go get an initial evaluation with my clinic's counselor before being refered to the specialist. (Even then, I had to fight to make the appointment with said counselor. "You would have been diagnosed already if you had it. You wouldn't have gotten good grades in school. You wouldn't be able to sit through this phone call with me." I don't like contention, and scheduling that appointment was a nighmare due to how much I had to argue to advocate for myself.) I am so happy that I researched adhd before getting that initial evaluation, because it was so skewed to one side of the spectrum. If I hadn't already researched and self-diagnosed myself, I never would have had the language necessary to get a positive on that evaluation. I had to give a lot of "No, I don't have that trait, but I have this instead," answers. After I made it past that initial evaluation, I was sent to an adhd specialist for a more official diagnosis. She spotted my adhd right away. No one but that specialist could recognize my adhd because everyone else thought of hyperactive adhd when they thought of adhd, which I don't fit. I was a very quiet and oddly patient child. I was far too anxious to be impulsive. I wasn't loud, and I definitely didn't cause any sort of disruption in school. Even as an adult, I am a rather quiet and cautious individual. I guess part of that is the autism (which my adhd specialist recognized and diagnosed a few months later), but much of it is because my adhd hyperactivity presents internally rather than externally. I in no way fit the stereotype of adhd, and that made it a whole lot harder to get diagnosed.
As a psychologist, our training on mental illness treatment and diagnosis is exactly ruling out physical illnesses to make a differential diagnosis. BUT IN PRACTICE - More often than not, when i refer patients to doctors to get them tested for things, the doctors throw the hot potato back to psychologists to "rule out mental illness" without doing anything :/. Sometimes the excuse is that "the patient was anxious/depressed/inattentive so maybe that's the cause of if the symptoms" completely ignoring that having underlying health issues can lead to a degradation of mental health.
i did autism research for almost 2 years and was in denial for over a year. i accepted myself passively (by that i mean i keep it to myself and very rarely tell people, just in case i'm wrong). it has helped me a lot to accept myself and my flaws. as a psych student i have experienced firsthand the dangers and benefits of self-diagnosis. my advice to other self-diagnosers is to WAIT. give yourself a certain amount of time and come back to the subject and see if anything changes. this has happened to me, as over a year ago i seriously thought i had AVPD but after waiting about 9 months, the symptoms more of less got better on its own (not gone just not a problem anymore).
@@pikachufiknight Gotcha, well I think a good way to tell (besides actually going and finding out for sure) is to figure out how the symptoms have affected someone throughout their life so far. Autism doesn't come on later, or go away for a bit and come back like mental disorders can because it's just the way the brain developed before birth. So for people who are unsure or haven't struggled with the symptoms for their entire lives so far it's likely one of the mental disorders that have similar symptoms.
@@Trahzy agreed. i've struggled with mine my whole life so it helped me come to terms with myself, both in the present and in the past, and to better work on myself right now to not struggle as much. but yeah that is a very good point.
@@Trahzy not true. autism is most likely caused by environmental stresses during the two and half decades that your body is developing. there is no proof of it being hereditary. there is no real proof of any mental illness being hereditary. mainly because they dont do control groups when studying that stuff. like you would have to take a kid from a diagnosed person and raise them completely in a healthy environment before you could ever acknowledge hereditary mental illness being real. we've had over 100 years to do this. billions of opportunities with poor peoples children (we work/starve them to death anyways, dont pretend you have a moral issue with taking a few children from poor people and raising them in nice environments for scientific research lol) to do this and have undeniable proof of hereditary conditions, but never did it. its quack science that just tries to explain to rich people why everyone doesnt handle their torturous conditions by saying there are things wrong with them and justifying their poor living conditions
I think it's also important to recognise that a lot of people don't have access to a diagnosis. They may not be able to afford it or the waiting list to see a psychiatrist could be incredibly long. A professional diagnoses can often lead to discrimination and a lot of people who self diagnose actually don't get a proper diagnosis because the pros don't out-weigh the cons. I think if you have self diagnosed and that diagnosis is really helpful to you and you get the accommodations you need from it then I think it's okay.
How is that an excuse? I'm very happy that in my country professional diagnosis is required for accommodations and meds. Dont ruin it for people who actually suffer from a disorder/illness
@@thefridge7335 How do you not understand that you don't begin "suffering" the day a doctor writes it down on a paper? Plenty of people are suffering but they cannot afford a doctor, or they've been waiting patiently for years. Stop bullying everyone in this comment section ffs. We get it, you don't care about people and you think that only people with access to facilities have rights.
@@moxxiemaximus if saying "I suspect I might have x" is not enough for you and you need to label yourself as x when it hasn't been confirmed yeah I will make fun of you because plenty of people do that. Keep crying.
Literally how is it any of your business? All people are doing is using their self diagnosis to understand how to put systems in place to help themselves function more optimally. If you want to laugh at people for helping themselves, go for it. But you're out here actively bullying strangers in a comment section. You don't get high moral ground because "a lot of people would do that".
@@thefridge7335 you need to understand though that people who self diagnose don't just hear a brief description of the mental illness and go "yeah that's me". They do hours and hours of research. People don't self-diagnose carelessly. In a lot of cases it's "this explains a good portion of my lived experience and I've spend months doing research on it, but I can't afford a diagnosis or the diagnosis could do more harm than good (due to the stigma around certain mental illnesses or neurodivergence) so I'm going to live my life in a way that allows me to be happy and ask for accommodations when I need it" and not "Yh I watched like one tiktok about autism and I relate to it so I guess I'm autistic"
This is so cool. Tbh, i have a vitamin D deficiency, adhd, anxiety, and depression. I do however think some of these are causes of the others and could be attributed to things like exercise, diet, sleep, and well yeah the vitamin D deficiency. This is sosososo cool and eye opening. I want to go into this exact field and you are such a role model
Im glad that you brought up Bloodwork because i remember feeling like something was off and always saying how tired i was to the dr. but my labs were normal and just felt like it was maybe just “me” or in my head. Im trying to finally get a proper eval. I don’t know what i have but i know its something. And its gatta get under control.
I never thought about self-diagnosing myself until a video about ADHD was about night owls and basically everything I did (and do) in my life started to make sense. In Argentina we have a large number of psychologists/psychiatrists per inhabitant, but it is extremely expensive if you do not have a paid health plan (and don't even count on free public health because they are basically non-existent),so each video is very helpful to me, they have really made positive changes in my life, and I believe that the day I can afford a specialist I will arrive with more knowledge about myself
i feel self advocacy is the most important especially with the american health care system and the disbelief in a lot of professionals and self diagnosis can be extremely helpful for that. everything starts with us noticing something in ourself and taking action. I would never judge someone in the system we have to take personal action instead of professional, as long as their lives as bettered for it.
I self diagnosed with ADHD and autism. Went to a professional and I was right. Gained practically nothing but a €600 invoice just to be told something I already knew. I understand that people shouldn't self dx based off of a single online quiz or a Tik Tok, but with things like autism, even clinicians have found the 90% of the time, the patient is correct in their assessment.
I knew I had clinical depression for years before I was diagnosed, I watched both my parents deal with depression for years and everything that I had experienced aligned with both their experiences and the research I had self conducted. The reason it took so long for me to get a diagnosis was simply because I had too much anxiety about approaching a doctor about my issues, as soon as I did I was immediately put onto ssri prescription. To this day I still don't get treated properly because my anxiety over getting medication and interacting with medical professionals outweighs my motivation to treat the issue I have. Ultimately I'm stuck in a kind of dumb self imposed cycle of feeling depressed, knowing I need help but refusing to act, getting better after a few months on my own, still not seeking help because now I'm better I'd rather ignore the issue, getting depressed again after a couple of months, rinse and repeat.
Be very careful when self analyzing, and always get a second opinion. That doesn't mean just find someone who is willing to give you a diagnosis to validate your cognitive bias that you may have about having a certain illness or disorder. It also helps to keep in mind that it is much harder to get some diagnoses than others so a bad (or inexperienced therapist) might unintentionally ignore or discount the likelihood for a particular diagnosis. Do not let a therapist doctor tell you that you don't have something simply because it is statistically improbable, if they do that, get a second opinion from a more specialized or experienced source because just them saying something like that as a reason could very well mean that they can't give you an actually good reason for why you don't have that thing but they just aren't willing to bet their career on giving you an incorrect diagnosis.
I'm 54 and my favorite thing is mindfulness. Being mindful has helped me quiet my mind and manage my emotions. I also do the simple things to optimize my cognition, energy and mood. Which are getting regular sleep, best hrs 10 pm to 6 am. Eat mostly home cooked foods, mostly meats and veggies. Be active and exercise at least 3 days a week. Maintain water and electrolytes. Learn breathing hacks to manipulate nervous system. And my favorite happiness hack is to have a dream or big goals. Having a dream gives you something exciting to look forward to. Goals and dreams give you something to live for. Something to align and plan your time, mind, energy, and identity to. Something to jump out of bed for. This will also be a challenging journey to help you grow and mature. To realize your potential and get to know your authentic self.
That's true for any DSM edition since all symptoms describe behaviors without addressing the mechanisms that cause them. Thats why only using 1 tool to diagnose mental illness is never good.
@@Ellaliluleloka I have Bipolar and ADHD (neither were self diagnosed. I didn’t think I had any illness until I was hospitalized and then diagnosed) and people aren’t as good at reading the DSM as they think they are. For example: I have heard people diagnosed/self-diagnosed with Bipolar II say something to the effect of, “I think I am hypomanic but my doctor/partner/family disagrees.” They then to proceed to list the symptoms list. But they stop there at the symptom checklist. If they continued to read literally five more lines further down the page they would have seen that those symptoms cannot just be subjective experiences, other people have to be able to notice a difference between those symptoms and how you generally act. Or that a doctor is refusing to diagnose them with Bipolar as they are good at “masking” there mania. But the problem is that if you have the ability to mask mania the intensity of your symptoms aren’t strong enough to rise to the level of mania. People only read the checklist of symptoms, which is usually half a page and not the other five pages of text that explains what they mean when they say “racing thoughts” for example. Doctors make similar mistakes as well. For example, if you’ve been depressed for a long time you can actually forget what normal (euthymic) feels like. Then when they go back to baseline it looks and feels like hypomania to them. When these people tell their Dr how they’re feeling they tend to overstate their symptoms, an abundance of energy, increased socializing, more talkative, sudden interest in projects, they don’t sleep as much but still feel great, they’re moving around more, and so on. Well dang, that sounds like f-ing mania. The dr, who may have only seen you depressed, is hearing this and you are describing as beyond typical for you (because what you view as typical has actually changed) now thinks you also have mania. But you don’t, you just had depression. This is where we get into a situation where bipolar is both over and under diagnosed.
Difficult topic but you made it so insightful. The video title kept me from watching but I'm glad I watched it! I personally am kinda torn about it. I struggled for a long long time until I was brave enough to see a therapist again. I didn't come with a diagnosis into it, I just researched a lot. I thought I might be autistic but discarded the thought because I thought I was a pretty normal child. I had phases where I diagnosed myself with everything: NPD, bipolar, schizophrenia and so on. I wanted to avoid confirmation bias so bad but it didn't help at all and was so confusing. The thing that led to my combined ADHD/ASD diagnosis was the lack of ANY sign that a physical condition could cause my struggles (I've been going through many different tests in the years w/o a therapist). We went through all possible psychological diagnoses. Well, those that made sense anyway, you shouldn't test yourself randomly on the internet and your doc neither, because if you did that, you would likely discover that you score high in some other disgnoses as well, even if they don't fit you when taking your history or other things into account. But because I did and still do struggle with normal life, we concluded that ADHD/ASD or more likely just one of those (we're not entirely sure yet which one) is most reasonable. However, I've encountered so many people who do not go through that process. They take random tests, score and then go "oh, that's nice, whoop, there goes my responsibility because I don't have this highly stigmatised diagnosis but this other one that I like more :)" I usually try to tell people that it's not that simple and that they should differentiate. Sometimes I get really angry when people say "oh, yeah, I might be on the spectrum too :)" and then not further explain or name examples that don't make sense at all. In one case, someone wasn't happy with their borderline diagnosis and they do behave textbook-like just to not seek help for that and say "ahhh, it's probably just my adhd :)" or they are in a rare social situation which you can't prepare for because it just doesn't happen often and they go "ahh, I struggle so much with this situation, I'm just so autistic :)" Things like that are so annoying because I don't struggle in specific situations, I struggle most of the time. To see people just "own" that diagnosis based on random situations ... I don't know. I really don't want to gatekeep, but it sometimes is so damn difficult to keep cool because I don't want to cause any harm. Any way, I'm personally okay with self-diagnosis if there is no option to see a doc and they take more than one possible cause into account, ideally you should then see a therapist or even someone specialized in that field. Only relying on a self-diagnosis can be difficult in some cases, I think.
I like how I got both a psychiatrist and counselor and I have confirmed AdhD but I continue to gaslight myself into thinking, well if it wasn't for a self diagnosis we would be here, guess I just don't wanna believe I have problems
I was asked by a few friends if I might have adhd. One friend explained her experiences, symptoms and treatement etc, and having no idea about adhd, it resonated so much that i opted to get an assessment through the NHS. I have yet to be assessed due to long waiting lists, I'm opting to go private next month. "Knowing" what I have after years of cbt for cognitive distortions has liberated me. It didnt however allow me to use ut as an excuse, it has actually given me a clear path that i can see ( alongside any eventual medication the clinic might suggest) to changing my problems. I know i have likely got this permanent condition, but now I can actually see how to help myself, mitigate the problems it causes. I am now optimistic, compared to before where I was just "broken".
24:00 THANK YOU! As someone who struggles with actual clinical diagnoses, I've bemoaned the destigmatization of mental health for this very reason, and I'm glad to see I'm not the only one. It's a fantastic thing to get empathy from people about things you can't control, but once everyone starts having self-diagnoses in attempts to get empathy from others (because we live in an empathy-starved society) that then has poisoned the well, as it were, for people with genuine clinical diagnoses. It's now SO socially acceptable to say "I have anxiety/depression/adhd" just because you're sad or flustered or w/e that it has come full circle in preventing people from genuinely understanding and empathizing with people who have real issues.
I actually watched Dr K's Adhd video and I self diagnosed myself and then I went to get a diagnosis. I think self diagnosis is important because if you're like me I've gone through my whole life wondering what's wrong with me. You lose hope after awhile and then with self esteem issues you feel like your life is one giant failure. Then compare that to a self diagnosis. I think it's worth it. Edit- But I don't use it as a crutch. It's not an excuse. I still have high standards for myself but I won't beat myself up if I make a mistake.
Thank you for talking about how doctors can miss things!! I have been struggling with finding good doctors that I often have to diagnose myself. I had bad migraines for a long time, ever since I was a kid. All of the doctors I saw basically said I was faking or that they weren’t that bad because all my blood work was normal. They told me to drink more water. I did and still had migraines. Recently they started to get worse. I was losing feeling in my feet, had memory and balance issues. I went to a new doctor after I had exhausted all of my testing options with the others. She knew exactly what I had and ordered an MRI. Come to find out, I have a chiari malformation. She has one too so she knew exactly what my issue was! It took a doctor literally knowing my pain for them to take me seriously. I went through the same thing with my fibroid. I ended up needing an emergency hysterectomy because none of the doctors I talked to ever listened to me when I told them I was in a lot of pain. Had a grapefruit sized fibroid in my uterine wall. I also had to diagnose my gallbladder issues. I didn’t have the typical symptoms of gallbladder issues so the doctors kept telling me my pain was chronic kidney stones. It was my gallbladder, liver and spleen that were inflamed. Now I struggle with finding a diagnosis for what’s been attacking my gallbladder, liver and spleen for all these years. It’s been a fight for me to figure these things out. I was once labeled as “drug seeking” by a doctor because I insisted he figure out WHY I was in pain. I didn’t want meds, I just wanted to fix the problem!
@@Mpire101 Same!! It was nice to find out the source. I cried during my diagnosis because someone finally believed me! I feel like a lot of doctors want to blame the patient instead of finding a disease. Even though I was skinny when I was younger and still had these problems, they still get blamed on my weight. I wouldn’t have migraines if I lost some weight, etc. I was routinely tested by all the doctors for the “fat people stuff;” diabetes, blood pressure, cholesterol. when everything came back normal, it’s like they would just give up. They wanted to find something wrong with me only related to my being fat.
After watching your ADHD video I self diagnosed myself with ADHD. Keen to watch this video and self-diagnose myself as a self-diagnoser.
good comment
Can’t wait to self diagnose myself with my 37th mental illness because I am just that good at self diagnosis
Self identified physiatrist here
Lolll twins
@@Joshua-mt1pv My pronouns are Dr/MD and you better remember it
A friend of mine self-diagnosed with depression about 10 years ago. Went to a therapist about a year later and the therapist just accepted the self-diagnosis. Cue 9 years of no treatments working at all. She went to an ER about 6 months ago for something unrelated and they ended up running her thyroid levels. Super, super hypothyroidism. Been on synthroid for 5 months and NIGHT AND DAY. She's happy, has energy, appropriate sleeping schedule, losing weight. It's amazing. She didn't think to add her cold-intolerance to her list because she didn't think it was relevant. She didn't think to add hair loss to her Google search for self-diagnosis. So many hypothyroid issues she didn't add to her search because she'd gone in with an unconscious confirmation bias for depression.
This is a great example of why its important to see a dr and one that will try and find the root of your symptoms for you! The depression symptoms could be from major depressive disorder, or it could be from a different depressive order like bi-polar. It could be a nutrient deficiency or some sort of illness. The point of a diagnosis is to be able to treat your symptoms properly to make you a healthier and happier person. Sometimes a self diagnosis is correct (you have to identify symptoms before you can be treated for them after all (and I was correct about my own MDD)) but health (especially mental health) is sort of like a puzzle or an investigation. You need trial and error to find the root cause. People get attached to a label they find for themselves and are resistant if that label might change. You see this with ADHD and autism a lot unfortunately. Being like "these symptoms sound a lot like me, I think im autistic" is fine but you will hopefully follow that up by seeing a dr and being open to exploring the cause of your symptoms. It sucks for the person who diagnosed themselves as ND and refuses a possibility of it being anything else and therefore is refusing treating the root of their issues, and it sucks for people like me who actually do have ADHD but whos voice is being drowned in a sea of people who probably dont actually have the disorder.
The amount of Instagram accounts that post info graphs and opinions that are presented as factual that are run by people who PROUDLY PROCLAIM they are self diagnosed is disturbing.
So her self diagnosis was correct then considering that hypothyroidism causes depression lol
She just didn't know the cause of the depression
Tbf not sure if self diagnosing was THE problem that led to 9 years of the wrong kind of treatment.
From people in my life I’ve seen doctors diagnosis things as depression so easily without trying to figure out why. Literally know 2 people who answered those short mental health questionnaires from their general practitioner honestly and were offered a prescription for depression without looking into it any further. One has severe trauma and should really be seen by a mental health professional to deal with it. The other had school work and family issues thrown on him at once and he needed help getting his life together not just drugs thrown at him.
Your friend went to the professional saying they were depressed and the professionals are the one that didn’t bother looking for the true cause. They failed at their actual job. If anything your friend did what they were supposed to. They went to a professional shortly after seeing signs of a problem. The professional did exactly what the example Dr K showed and was biased towards MDD instead of looking into other things like hypothyroidism.
Might be an example of how self diagnosing can be wrong but it really does highlight issues with how some professional diagnose even greater
I've thought for years I was depressed or had anxiety, but I noticed recently I stopped really feeling that dread. I stopped crying, I smile and laugh and it feels genuine. I thought I was faking it for so long I started believing it, but I think I was lying to myself the whole time. I feel like I was just making excuses to avoid my problems, and all these years I spent moping I was just trying to avoid doing things I didn't want to do. I was never diagnosed, and I never really wanted help, just thinking about it all makes me sick. If anything I deserve to genuinely experience those things, being so ignorant and entitled, so twisted to emulate such behavior. I'm not sure if I'd even believe it if I were diagnosed
Because there is really no such thing as mental illness, if you take enough philosophy courses and have a foundation in logic then you go read psychology it's very obvious it's nothing but pseudoscience, self-diagnosis is required. Even though a psychiatrist may make a diagnosis if one goes to a psychiatrist he must fill out many forms of self-reporting that is the only way to tell there is such a purported illness. If the psychiatrist cannot make a diagnosis without such self-report how is self diagnosing mental illness not the standard? There been so many studies proving that psychiatrists can't make a consistent diagnosis when showing the same patient to multiple psychiatrists, in short the field is nothing but pseudoscientific garbage with a bunch of charlatans pushing pharmaceuticals for no other reason than big paychecks. The real screwed up part is most of them know the drugs don't cure anything and deal with symptoms indirectly while causing tremendous side effects..
I've done months of research on adhd (how I stumbled upon your channel). But I've always told myself I could be completely wrong and I'm going to have to be ok with that. It's invalidating/demoralizing when ppl just assume you saw one article and decided you have whatever. I'm trying to get a diagnosis, however, research is all I got right now
I felt the same way - I tried to keep an open mind and recognize that a therapist might think differently. I wasn't wrong though, and I got the diagnoses. My best bit of advice is to analyze if and how these symptoms overlap with symptoms of depression and anxiety. A lot of mental health professionals are quick to dismiss ADHD symptoms as symptoms of depression and anxiety, so if you can think far enough back to your childhood and assure that symptoms of ADHD were present before any other potential illnesses, it could save you a lot of time they might try to spend ensuring that your symptoms aren't just something else.
I would see if you can get a referral from your doctor for a psychiatric evaluation. They take a while but I think it is worth doing. I was sure I had ADHD, but it ended up being really bad anxiety. Most of the symptoms are the same, but the treatment is different. I was already diagnosed with anxiety by my psychiatrist, but the eval made it much more evident just how bad it was.
@@joshi897 yep! I watched a video that talked about looking at symptoms in your child hood. So I did that and WOW, I missed so many things. Things I thought was normal. I can see why my mom would always get mad at me for forgetting to take out the trash lol
Good luck to you! I never suspected I had ADHD but multiple other people asked me if I did. The first tipoff that I actually did have it was when I was prescribed phentermine for weight loss and it did nothing. I realized I had actually never had any effect from any stimulant (coffee etc). After self medicating for many years and decades of misdiagnoses and failed treatments for depression , anxiety etc... I finally found a wonderful psychiatrist who believed me and didn't talk to me like I was an id10t. It is possible ♥️
The purpose of getting a diagnose is to get help to improve it. Did you go and get some help? ADHD is like any mental illness on a spectrum. Where to the left is Zero symtoms and when its a problem in your day to day life then you have illness.
Dude yes, getting a diagnosis can be extremely liberating. I lived for ~24 years as an undiagnosed autistic and when a friend asked me "could you be on the autism spectrum?", it prompted me to research that. After deeply looking into it, I began telling family and friends that I suspect I'm autistic. I immediately got shut down at every turn and they invalidated all of the concerns I listed that motivated my opinion. Then, I saw a clinical psychologist and got diagnosed. Unfortunately, my actual diagnosis barely changed anything at all, but at least now I know it isn't just made up or anything, I really am autistic and all of these struggles over the years have been legitimate. The validation and liberation was one of the best experiences of my life. I finally know why I feel so different from others and why I stand out from any crowd I'm in, etc.
Interestingly, I looked into several other conditions that could have explained some of my symptoms over the years and I ruled them out as I went along. By the time I was 24 and the friend asked about autism, I had already stopped looking into anything and I had gaslighted myself into thinking I'm completely normal and everyone is secretly going through exactly the same stuff I was. So I sort of ruled out a lot (schizophrenia, psychopathy, OCD, and more) because I had some symptoms that matched those in some contexts, but then a few would mis-match so hard that it was obvious that those would have been inappropriate.
I wish I knew what was normal while I was growing up. In hindsight, it's so obvious that I'm autistic, but I just never knew what was normal, so I never knew that I wasn't normal...
@@MathIguessvery similar experience! I started self diagnosing at around 30 and was confirmed autism at 32. If the 8 therapists that I had since I was 7 years old had actually cared about looking for causes instead of making me feel guilty and/or sick for my symptoms I'd have saved myself A LOT of suffering.
@@eprd313 yeah, something I didn't highlight in my initial comment was the immense suffering that one can go through when coping with undiagnosed neurodivergence. I'd never wish that on anyone. Often, some of the behaviours that are normal for us, are characterised as "naughty" or wrong in general. This can lead to horrible self esteem, denial of our basic (neurodivergent) needs, assuming far more responsibility in contexts where we can't handle that responsibility which leads to burnout or overstimulation.. the list goes on. I am doing my best to bring it to the attention of those around me that mental health awareness is really important and especially parents should educate themselves on the signs so that they can get their child the accommodations or help that they need. The stigma needs to be broken...
Sorry, I think I digressed. I was initially trying to extend empathy, being undiagnosed was really not good for me so if it was similar for you, then I'm really sorry for that. I'm glad you learned the truth though and I'm glad you're enabled to be more kind to yourself from here on :)
@@MathIguess no, no digression at all! Those are very valid points and I completely agree with everything you said.
Wow yeah, I’m 22 and am undiagnosed but I studied psych in school because I was obsessed with trying to learn about the way people (including myself) act, and while doing so studied a lottttt on different mental disorders and disabilities. I always ruled out autism because I honestly just didn’t want to consider it; I had the stereotypical idea of autism in my head, which seemed harder to accept at the time than all my friends who were self diagnosing with adhd and stuff. But I knew I definitely could rule out every other thing for one reason or another. Finally I’m now looking into autism and I started reading “unmasking autism” by Devon Price (which i highly recommend if you haven’t read it), and literally cried through the prologue because I had never heard my experience and my exact feelings told so specifically. Then to look at the history and the diagnosis I started having memories come back that I haven’t remembered in forever and it’s just been wild.
And because of all of this I’ve become so self aware in and also confident in a way I never was. I’ve been able to distinguish between autistic burnout and depression. I got diagnosed with depression because I was too socially anxious to go to see a doctor, so I did the whole intake online and got diagnosed that day and prescribed anti depressants. The meds didn’t really work most of the time, and I thought it was weird to call it depression because most of the time I wasn’t even sad, I just had no energy. That’s all I could say sometimes to ppl asking what was wrong, “no energy.” Idk it’s just really cool to finally have an explanation like this because literally my whole childhood and identity issues and my problems with my parents are rooted in this.
This is probably my 4th time sharing my experience online in weird places because I’m still building a friend group and it’s felt so good connecting with people on this. Still not officially diagnosed but it would be seriously weird if it was something else. Also would be weird to relate so heavily to a first person autistic experience lol
I self-diagnosed myself with ADHD after tons of research and then got myself a doctors appointment(I’m Canadian don’t worry) talked to my doctor, she set me up with some stuff to give my mum and teachers, when I handed them back I got diagnosed with combined type ADHD(severe). The only reason I hadn’t been diagnosed sooner was because my brain was able to brute force low 90s to high 80% in classes💀
I feel like if a get a diagnosis i'll be in the same situation as you are
i think i have ocd plus i was in special ed i have bad thought tell i will get murder so i have to be clean and neat idk lol
@@bigsteppa7103 a lot of people self diagnose themself with ocd, why do you think so?
Ayeeee
“I’m Canadian don’t worry”
Dude I’m worried they’ll talk you into killing yourself over it.
I think many people misunderstand self-diagnose with faking disorders and stuff, like nowadays we kinda pass through some people faking illnesses bc they think it's "silly" or to get views online. In my opinion self-diagnose is more like doing research and getting to know yourself better and going to a psychologist to know more about yourself. Faking disorders is still a problem that most people don't separate from self-diagnose.
Exactly.. true. I feel like a depression might a result of something bigger that was left unaware of maybe. I literary fit one mild disorder on schizophrenic spectrum, in all 'checkboxes' (no match for all checkboxes in anything else i found) and i kind of feel even ashamed to even mention it here. Lets see what my new psychiatrist is going to think about it. I had like two psychogists and they were so nonresponsive, felt like talking to a microphone. Meanwhile making stuff up is bad, cant blame some people that they havent found anything more sensible to believe in.
But the issue is that the amount research people do varies. While there are cases like what you mentioned there are also people who use surface level information to diagnose themselves. Sometimes people can convince themselves that they have an issue even when they don’t because the human brain is susceptible to bias. In some of those cases people will even start exhibiting symptoms they didn’t have until they researched it. The real issue with self diagnosis is a lack of clinical knowledge and the inability to be objectivite.
Exactly. The vast, vast majority of self-diagnosers dont change their behavior for attention. Thats easy to forget with the way cringe culture puts a spotlight on the outliers who do fake mental illnesses
i diagnose myself as cool
I diagnose my self as the thiccest MF on this earth
As a self-proclaimed doctor of cool, I validate your diagnosis of cool :)
@@seth_piano As the president of the cool nation, I proclaim that this man is, in fact, very cool.
lol this is the best comment
🕶 your government mandated shades, sir.
It's so disheatening to see that a lot of people apparently skipped over the differential diagnosis section :'D It was a really good explanation.
I got differentially diagnosed into being put on a medication to treat anxiety that caused me to have severe depression and anxiety. Fuck Lexapro and fuck the Medical-Industrial Complex that loves to dole out physically addictive antidepressants like they're handing out candy.
omg northflowo fancy seeing you here
I agree with him, although I'd say there's two or three things you get from a doctor that generally make it preferable. The differential diagnosis, treatment and potentially notes to hand in when requesting accommodations.
But, that being said, sometimes the diagnoses are just broken. Schizoid Personality Disorder, Autism Spectrum Disorder and Social Pragmatic Communication Disorder are all autism and likely to eventually be fixed at some point. Those first two, the ScPD and ASD are virtually impossible to tell apart in many cases without a lot of extra testing because ScPD started out as the adult version of what would become Asperger's Syndrome. The two are a massive amount of overlap, but the fact that ScPD is considered to be a personality disorder, it doesn't require as much evidence from the past as ASD does.
This is especially problematic for adults of a generation before the cameras were everywhere, as it can be hard to provide the necessary supporting evidence to say for sure that it's autism versus just being schizoid.
@@SmallSpoonBrigade Oh yeah for sure the diagnostic criteria are jank as hell sometimes. But it's also important to remember that because mental health diagnosis is almost always based on symptoms and not specific cause, diagnostic criteria is always going to be drawing borders in moving water. What we're taught in psychologist training is that diagnoses are mainly for bureucracy, and really clients should be treated as individuals with their own individual sets of symptoms.
So basically rather than saying that the diagnoses are broken, I would say that at any given moment they represent reality to some degree, but getting them completely "correct" is impossible. Our socially shared definitions of mental health & specific diagnoses are ever-changing and differ culturally. Treating diagnoses like they're the end-all to mental health is bad practice.
I self diagnosed my adhd, and later got an actual diagnosis from a psychiatrist. Before I could afford an actual professional diagnosis, I still was working on improving my situation. The research helped me function better and helped with my depression. Self diagnosis saved my life from self deletion. Not everyone has my experience but some probably do… and for them it’s worth it. And when I could afford a professional diagnosis, I wasn’t shocked and neither were my loved ones.
For a lot of people I know self-diagnosis is the start of self-acceptance
Makes sense. I think self diagnosis is more valid when you aren't the type of person with a victimhood mentality.
@@Mpire101 This! So much stuff just makes sense to me now and I'm ok with it
This is so true. I'm glad it helped you and you were able to get through it.
Ok but the underlying moral of your story should be to check with a professional before handing yourself a mental label cuz someone online gave a short list of things you might have.
Not a mental illness, but a chronic illness. I had a gut feeling about my diagnosis as a teen. Took FIFTEEN years to get "bad enough" and find a doctor that actually listened and paid me any attention before I got proper help and a diagnosis. Definitely follow your gut and fight for yourself to find one of the good docs out there.
I'm curious what was the illness and what was the symptoms? (If you're not comfortable it's ok, I just I believe it would help other people who might also have those symptoms if you share about it)
For people with anxiety same follow your gut is about the most unhelpful thing you can ever tell them because anxiety makes their own brain an unreliable source of what is and is not a problem
yes, follow your gut, but don’t continuously go to doctors until they give you the answer you’re looking for. i was misdiagnosed as having Bipolar One. i always knew it was incorrect, but i didn’t go browsing around for a different diagnosis. it wasn’t until i was 20 that i went back to treatment, for an unrelated matter. turns out i have Borderline Personality Disorder w/ co-morbid, Moderate To Severe Post Traumatic Stress. it made all the sense in the world, once it was spelled out for me. idealizing/devaluing, jealousy, uncontrollable rage, paranoid ideation + dissociation, intense fear of abandonment.
@@orbitalchildfollow your gut doesn't mean believe everything that your mind says. I see it more like don't gaslight yourself when you feel that a diagnosis isn't accurate or complete, and if something resonates look for solid answers.
I didn't need a dictor to know that i suffered from chronic depression till my twenties. Eventually you'll realize that its not normal to walk around like an emotionless corps with nothing but a constant stream of negative and suicidal thoughts running through your head. And when i got rid of that i didn't need a doctor to know that i have transitioned to anxiety disorder when you suddenly fear everything down to your own shadow despite not being in danger and never feeling this way before.
I am now relatively healthy as far as i can tell and it was precisely because of self diagnosis and self therapy.
The challenge with self diagnosis is people seem to simply search for confirmation of a specific diagnosis. It’s almost as if it allows them to go, “ah ha! I knew there was a reason for X!”. Then they may overestimate the issue, at least in my case.
I definitely fell prey to this while learning more about social anxiety. It genuinely increased my level of anxiety at an artificially rapid rate. The internet is a wild place.
Web MD makes you think your cough might be cancer.
@@meko98743 Web MD has probably produced more stress-induced illness than it has prevented 😅
Yes! And if a doctor tells them they don't have the diagnosis, they will see different doctors until one finally diagnoses them with the condition and they'll be like ah ha all those other doctors were incompetent, only this doctor who gave me the diagnosis that I wanted knows what they're doing.
Confirmation bias.
@@vans4lyf2013 it’s tricky though, just because a doctor says yes or no though isn’t an absolute. Doctors can misdiagnose either way, they’re not perfect, doctors can also have confirmation bias. Get a consensus. If you have 4 doctors saying you do and 1 saying you don’t, go with the 4. I agree though don’t ignore the 4 and go with the 1 saying you do have it.
I once went to the doctor and told him I had severe depression (it was dead obvious to me as I was borderline suicidal at the time). He wrote me off with "high blood pressure". After a test my blood pressure was perfect.
This is just one example out of many, and I have given up on going to doctors as they haven't fixed any of my issues ever.
Yeah same here, got a pat on the back and told I'll be fine meanwhile I was thinking about how I'd do it for a large part of the day. On another time I got a *just* Rorschach at a clinical psychologist and told I'm fine, even while he saw I struggled to even think of enough interpretations of the blotters(half of them I had to make up completely unrelated to the images just so he was satisfied and had "enough")
I once went to my doctor begging her to help me with my lifelong insomnia. (This was about a decade after I first realized the way I slept wasnt normal or healthy and the third doctor i asked for help on the matter.) She brushed it off as poor diet & exercise habits due to obesity. I pointed out the PCOS diagnosis to her in my chart and described my dietary and exercise habits. I told her I had just as much trouble sleeping as a skinny prepubescent child as I do now as a slightly overweight adult. She confidently came to the conclusion that my insomnia was caused by lifelong anxiety and depression. I told her my insomnia was not associated with a restless mind. She brushed me off and perscribed me a 7 day supply of an anti-anxiety medication. Told me to try it anyways and request a refill once I realize it worked.
I never slept worse in my life than I did those 7 days. I ended up giving up on trying to get accepted for a sleep study after over a decade of trying and now just take CBD to fall asleep.
The only time doctors ever took me seriously and actually provided me a proper formal diagnosis was when they diagnosed me with PCOS, but it took FOUR YEARS of me telling my PCP my periods were still irregular before they offered me any help whatsoever. But now I have to correct every doctor who isnt a gynocologist about my condition because they try to make conclusions about my health based on common myths and easily disputable misinformation about the condition.
Self diagnosis may be helpful for certain people if it also makes them seek further help and/or targeted treatment, but there are huge limitations. Your example with hypothyroidism was well chosen; if one thinks they have depression, but actually suffer from hypothyroidism, they'll probably land in a situation of severe crisis once they notice that months of practicing mindfulness, eating healthily, cultivating productive habbits, etc. doesn't help them…
Agreed. If it makes the person recognize they have an opportunity to improve their situation, then that’s a net benefit.
Though ultimately, if a person couldn't access a diagnosis anyway due to financial or life reasons than its not like mindfulness, eating healthy, or cultivating productive habits harmed them either. Unfortunately, not self diagnosing doesn't always mean being able to seek an official diagnosis.
and furthermore, self diagnosing can be the motivation to seek an official diagnosis for those that can and hopefully uncover those other issues once with a medical professional.
the vast majority of peoples "mental disorders/illnesses" are just perfectly normal and healthy responses to being tortured to death slowly like our lovely economic system thinks is fine to do to 99% of the human species lol. most people are literally starving to death and will die from labor induced starvation / the problems it causes.
@@saturationstation1446 I don’t know if there’s anydata to support the idea that 99% of clinical mental health concerns are fabricated or solely due to society. I’m sure there are quite a few, but many people are born with a clinical illness
Just pointing out how he said we when referring to women. Treating men and women as separate species happens so often these days and it warms my heart to see people like you truly acknowledging our humanity, Thank You.
After doing intense research for months, I diagnosed myself with ADHD. The first two professionals dismissed me "because I wasnt jumping around and could listen to them". I am SO GLAD that I did not listen and instead informed myself, because I found a doctor who believed me and put me on meds. I changed doctors now, but I still get my meds and it changed my life for the better. I believe that its all about the amount of research and self reflection you do, in my case I immensly profited from it, I wouldn't have gotten diagnosed officially otherwise
I have gone through FIVE since August and it's making me want to give up
Bravo to you for not listening
I'm glad you had a good outcome here, I actually had the exact same thing happen to me with my BPD and I'm currently going through it with ADHD. I was so bloody certain I had BPD, just the whole thing resonated so comfortably with everything I'd experienced, I had to seek out the diagnosis though for sure, and I got lucky that I found the clinical psychologist that I did who was extremely in-depth and diagnosed me with not only BPD but other things I didn't realise I had to the extent of the diagnoses. Always trust yourself if you well and truly feel like something resonates with you to the deepest extent.
@@simply_pet exactly. If you feel like you are being misinterpreted, thats absolutely valif and probably true. Sadly I made a lot of bad experiences with ignorant doctors, and without doing my own research I'd be way worse than I am right now.
I always feel some type of way when I see someone claim success about finally getting the diagnosis they want after doctor shopping to get it, because the other doctors refused to give it to them. If several doctors are saying you don't have it and one finally says you have it, couldn't it be the case that more likely than not you don't actually have the condition? I see this with ADHD and Autism in particular all the time. People will say the string of doctors who didn't diagnose them are incompetent, and use the fact that they finally found one doctor to diagnose them as evidence that they were right the whole time...maybe they do have the condition but the fixation of wanting to be a diagnosed with a specific condition just seems a bit strange to me.
My first psychiatrist thought I was an opiate addict.
Second psychiatrist diagnosed me with major depression and Bipolar.
Second therapist diagnosed me with DID, Bipolar w Psychosis, and ADHD. Then dismissed prior autism diagnoses.
The treatment from the last (whom i still have) has helped me so much. She even found me a psychiatrist she works with often.
Always good to keep looking.
Btw, I have a long psychiatric medical history. Since I was like 3 years old. I gathered over 11+ psychiatric diagnoses. Redundant and repetitive throughout my life.
I'm finally healing
I'm so sorry to hear about the incompetency of your previous doctors, and am glad to hear you are finally on the right path. I've been struggling for about 3 years between 4 different doctors who've all given different diagnoses, but think I've also finally found one that can actually listen to me.
I entered the mental health field, as a patient, when I was around 13 (the first time I remmeber going to a therapist). I've been in and out of hospitals and have many misdiagnoses along the way. I finally got a proper diagnosis and began getting proper treatment when I was 36 years old. So many years not understanding why meds didn't help or why symptoms didn't fit. So many years thinking I was just too broken and not capable of healing or understanding myself. Nobody asked the write questions and things that were pathological were being grossly overlooked. I feel more free now despite the uncertainty I face daily. At least I know what's causing the uncertainty.
I was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia before my psychiatrist changed it to bipolar with psychosis (now bipolar 1 with psychosis). I was lucky in that the medication was reacting so badly for me that my diagnosis changed within 2 months. I'm sure I probably have co-mental illnesses, as my family history is repleate with mental illness 🤒. But my major problem has and is my psychosis. It is worse when I'm in a depressed state. But if I have no sound like videos or music, I start to hear voices, and sometimes I will unwilling answer them outloud. This has a tendency to freak people out. My husband will look at me odd and ask if I'm up on my meds.
I just try to listen to long TH-cam videos and podcasts to try to keep the psychosis in check.
I love the message: go ahead and research, come to your own conclusion, and share those with the professional. The patient’s insight plus the doctor’s expertise, working together, can be really powerful. Doctor’s need to listen to patience too. I’ve had great luck with this with my doctors. In my experience, therapists seem to be worse at this than regular doctors, ironically.
Notably absent from this discussion is the access issues involved in living under a for-profit healthcare system. People may be less prone to self diagnosing if access to medical treatment was affordable, i.e., accessible.
yep, this is the big one. many people have no option BESIDES self diagnosis and treatment
especially considering many of the diagnoses we're talking about make it much harder to go and see a professional or effectively communicate their experience to a professional, even for those who have the time and money to do so
i for example have pretty bad social anxiety which would make it very difficult for me make an appointment and talk to a professional
Every time someone covers this topic they just... They nod at it and move on, as if it's just a side concern and not the PRIMARY REASON.
@@RobinTheBot and aside from for profit healthcare, there's still a lot of racial and other biases leading to misdiagnosis due to drs not believing what's being communicated with them or drs not taking them seriously.
Yup, price is an important factor as well. My best friend had to pay 3,000 USD for a mental health assessment where the diagnostician actually refused a diagnosis for ASD even though he met all the diagnositic criteria because he "has too many friends to be autistic. Autistic people don't usually have many friends if any at all," which is blatantly untrue.
I had to loan him half the money he needed for that assessment. What do people expect him to do? Go to the bank and ask for another $3,000 loan to find a better assessor? What if that one is also discriminatory against autistic people? Where do people think we have the time and money to spend thousands of dollars on pursuing an accurate diagnosis?
I am not officially diagnosed with Autism, but I feel like I have it due to some very hyper specific traits I have heard. However the biggest issue I have found is autism diagnosis is apparently REALLY HARD in adults because autistic adults have built up their masking techniques. I also really do not have time or money for therapy any more, but I really really want an official diagnosis.
Two things that really made me look in the mirror and ask were:
I heard a guy describing his autism as feeling like a different species than everyone around you. As a child I literally thought I was an Alien or an Angel/Nephilim because I legitimately did not know how to relate to other kids. It took years of stepping on social landmines till I found the 'correct' techniques for "how to be human".
The second thing is I have had a lot of discussions with friends, acquaintances, coworkers, etc. who are officially diagnosed with autism and there always was a point in our conversations where they would say something like, "So how long have you known you've had autism?" or "When did you get diagnosed with autism?" or "You get it, it's hard having autism am I right?" and my response was always, "Oh no no no I don't have autism." And then it kind of just was one of those wow a lot of autistic people say relatable things and a lot of them also are asking if I have autism... wait a second....
Basically what I tell people is, "I do not have a doctors diagnosis, but I have found that I relate to experiences of people with autism and I have found that some of the behavioral techniques they employ to make it through the day also help me with my feelings. Therefore I feel I might have it, but as I said I am not officially diagnosed."
Why are you self diagnosing on a video explaining why that's harmful
@@webbyisheredid you read what they said???
Same. An autism diagnosis is so difficult to find. I've talked about it to my doctors, therapists, and psychiatrists over the last couple years and they're all like "¯\_(ツ)_/¯ maybe, hard to find someone who can actually screen you lol" and give zero direction towards resources. I'm not like "I 100% am autistic", but a diagnosis still isn't something I can access despite seeking it out.
@@webbyishere reading compression my guy...
i’ve suspected i’ve had it for some time now, and have looked into numerous resources such as the dsm and resources adjacent to them. i’m 20, and am on a waitlist to get tested, but i don’t know if it’s worth it at my age. the only thing i believe it would give me, and what i’ve heard from others, is clarity. but i’ve dealt with it for so long that i don’t know if it’s worth getting one
When I was younger, I self-diagnosed myself with an anxiety disorder, and I've always known this to be completely true. My earliest memories of age 5 include being absolutely terrified, unable to sleep or calm my mind, and my family mocked me and called me a "worry wart." They said to just "stop worrying." I have lived with anxiety for my entire life, and it's never gone away, not once. As I got older, I had my first panic attack, and those became more frequent very quickly. I also went through some traumatic things though, so I've wondered whether or not it's the anxiety causing my panic attacks or if I have PTSD. Either way, I know for certain that I have anxiety, and I also dealt for depression for around 6 years. Not professionally diagnosed, but do you need to be when every day is a struggle to keep yourself alive? It was bad. I feel like anxiety and depression are the easiest to self-diagnose.
With that said, there was a short time in high school where I convinced myself that I had schizophrenia. No, I don't have it. But I wrote a list, checked off symptoms, and made a calendar where I jotted down what affected me each day. I'm embarrassed by it all now, but at the time, convincing myself I had something I didn't was easier than facing the truth. The truth was that I was actively experiencing trauma in those years, and it was a very complicated and messy situation. I think people should be careful when they are reading about disorders online. It's easy to say "this is definitely me, this is what I have," but that's not always true. It could be something very different. Do your research and self-reflection, but keep your mind open and don't settle on the first disorder you read about. Sometimes you just KNOW what it is, like I did with anxiety, but sometimes we're wrong. It could be anything, and you don't want to diagnose yourself with the wrong disorder.
I definitely relate to you, I was so traumatized at 16 that I couldn't speak to people without thinking horrific things. I thought I was manic, insane, no going back from the deep end. But I got better and realized I was severely burnt out, traumatized, I had undiagnosed and untreated OCD and autism.
I wouldn't judge your younger self, you were scared and wanted help. But no one was offering it to you. So you took it into your own hands.
That entire first paragraph hit me directly at the heart. I feel you. And as for schizophrenia, when I began having some audio and olfactory hallucinations, I thought that was going to be my fate as well. Turns out, depression can do that to you (and many other things). I hope you're getting the help you need.
The "not listening to their patients" thing is SO important. A psych I went to talked to me for 2 hours and decided there wasn't enough evidence of childhood signs. Because she didn't ask for any. I could have given her all my old report cards but no. Though, my next psych didn't ask about those bodily kinds of things (like rashes) either.
"Psychiatric diagnosis have a way of piling up". Yes, but so do the comorbidities. I went from "only" having social anxiety starting with puberty, to depression as a resulting secondary disease and then piled substance abuse on top, which in the short term made the first two a bit more bearable (this is a bad thing, because it prevents people from seeking help), while in the long term worsening these conditions because they aren't being treated.
You may then find yourself in a situation, where you have to dismantle that stack one by one, before you can even start tackling the core problem and it's likely that things will temporarily feel hopeless or even worse before they can get better. If you put in the work, they do eventually get better though.
Yeah I went from depression to also having anxiety and then substance abuse before being diagnosed with autism and adhd
Yes, and that's ultimately a large part of why I wound up being recommended schizoid personality disorder rather than autism spectrum disorder. I already had questionable diagnoses for both schizoaffective disorder and schizotypal personality disorder in the past. And, I didn't really interact enough with other children for the lack of connection to be obvious. And, ScPD and ASD are virtually identical other than the age of onset where in my case, I was a bit too old for ASD, but a bit too young for ScPD.
I've also had a bunch of things that were comorbid to both.
The differential diagnosis part is so, so important. I went to a doctor thinking I had ADHD. I got a little chart, checked a lot of the boxes, and got sent to a psychiatrist. They instantly ruled out ADHD and I had to go back for an autism diagnosis instead. The reason I can't focus? Sensory issues. It's hard to focus when my brain can't block out any other stimuli. I think self-diagnosis is an important base, but it shouldn't be the final diagnosis
There is a major issue here, its that the psychiatrists also make a lot of wrong diagnostics. I noticed that autism, gifted spectrum and complex ptsd get way under diagnosed. It took me nearly 30 years to get the right diagnostic for those. I think a good diagnostic should be a team effort where we work together to test that diagnostic constantly, especially in the case of conditions resistant to treatment. I've been misdiagnosed as depressed, then bipolar disorder then diagnosis stoped altogether as no treatment worked( I ended up being highly neurodivergent and having severe complex ptsd) I had to look into it myself and learn by myself for years until I could find what was wrong. Then I went to my psychiatrist and got new case workers to remake a diagnosis and get help for the right stuff.
That's the tricky thing about mental illness vs autism. Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder that's there from birth while mental disorders like bipolar and ptsd are environmentally induced and can come and go throughout life, though symptoms often intertwine and autistic people usually have mental illnesses as well. This causes lots of confusion and misinterpretation with diagnostics.
@@Trahzy autism isn't a disorder by itself. It's a neurodivergence that causes social rejection as neurodivergence is poorly understood by the public at large causing conflicts, misunderstandings and discrimination, that in turn cause other anxiety related issues. Its a bit the same way having a darker skin is often accompanied with similar issues where they are a minority. The issues are not due to the initial state but the public reaction.
@@shorgoth Disorder, divergence, whatever it's just the way the brain develops and directly affects social interaction and many other functions from childhood onwards. Unlike mental illnesses which are entirely environmentally developed.
@@Trahzy a disorder would mean it is a "bad thing" while its normal and genetically created with its own set of pros and cons compared to neuronormative brains. What would stop most of the issues is social acceptance and understanding and branding it as a disorder does not do that, it perpetuates the idea that people with autistic traits need to be fixed. This is basically like beating children who use their left hand because it's "the hand of the devil" like they used to do instead of making left-handed scissors as we do now. This is why I make the distinction and it's an important one.
This! I just learned that the psych I saw for my ADHD diagnosis got it completely wrong, and it was all because he didn't validate the answers I gave on the assessment. I was one point short and he just went "nope it's not that". When talking to someone about it they asked me what I scored, so I redid it for them. They took one look at the fidgeting criteria that I'd marked as low and they said, "but you CONSTANTLY pick at your fingers!". I'd never considered it fidgeting, and if the doctor had paid attention during the consult he'd have noticed that I was doing it the entire time. Basically, if your patient is ONE point short surely it should be standard practice to validate some of their responses?!
Diagnosing is so hard. My cousin had depression like symptoms so her mother sent her to the psychiatrist, he gave her anxiety and depression disorder diagnosis and meds for it.
But she only got worse, not only emotionally but physically. She couldn't stand from bed for weeks. After that, we decided to take her to an endocrinologist were she had hypothyroidism diagnosed. Started taking meds and after that she got better. Obviously stopped taking the antianxiolitics
That's awful, the psychiatrist first told me to get tested if I have a thyroid issue, and only then accepted to see me and diagnose me with an anxiety disorder. This gave me the impression that all psychiatrists do that beforehand, but I guess not.
I have known I was different for a long time. I just didn’t catch on to this mysterious “thing” that others seemed to be born with. There were people that seemed to know how to interact and I always felt like an outsider looking in. I used to describe it as people were born with a user/game manual that told them what all these hidden rules were and I didn’t get mine.
I was scared to have kids because I never wanted them to feel like I did growing up. It was really lonely. I ended up having my daughter and I saw that she was struggling the same way I was. I took her to get evaluated by a psychologist and they said she had ASD. When I went through the home eval, everything I could check off for her, I could also apply to myself.
I haven’t been officially diagnosed, but it’s nice to have a name to what I’ve felt. I may eventually, but now I have an explanation for being “the weird kid.”
I'm sorry I'm triggered with your post. I apologize in advance if I make you feel invalidated. As a fact: NOBODY IS BORN WITH USER MANUAL, N-O-B-O-D-Y. That said, being extremely ignorant about mental illness, I have heard that some people have the impossibility to learn certain things. I don't know that is a fact, but maybe that's the problem. I, having gone through the painful process of learning how to interact with people (and still missing a lot of road to walk), restate: NOBODY IS BORN WITH USER MANUAL
@@LucasDanielSantoro Autistic people are born without the glasses needed to read the manual same difference. If you are aggressively gonna shut down someone, at least have the decency not to spew BS. You are also missing the part where it's an analogy with the goal to convey a feeling. And last but not least, yes nobody is born without the manula, but the ones who provide the manual are the parents, and not every parent does that, and if your parents don't, then you definitely aren't gonna know what to fucking do.
@@LucasDanielSantoro The thing is ASD has a weird relationship with intelligence. I am actually diagnosed and fully aware how I differ from 'normal' people. This does not make me comfortable behaving their way fully, but it helps to 'fit' in compared to someone who isn't aware.
@@LucasDanielSantoro It sure as hell seems to me like most people are born with more of a user manual than I was. It's not an issue of "some people can't learn some things", it's "I'm different, I know it, you know it, everyone knows it, and because of that I'm an outsider and treated differently, poorly, for something I cannot control (trust me, I've tried to the point of giving myself cripplingly low self-esteem by constantly comparing myself and my complete ineptitude at social interaction and now never feel like I'm good enough for anything remotely social in nature) and did not choose." I am acutely aware of exactly how I am different, what others do that I don't, and what I do that others don't, but in trying to "correct" these things, all I end up doing is causing myself harm in many ways, and just making everyone else uncomfortable by just managing to fall straight into uncanny valley in my attempts at interaction. Good for you if you could overcome that and learning how to do those things. You are probably autistic as well but much better at masking than I am, not necessarily something to be proud of and definitely not something to use as ammunition to put others down and invalidate them like you are. But there very much were people born with that user manual. Or at least parts of it. Those people who are absolutely confident in themselves and those around them, who know how to navigate the interpersonal landscape that is modern society, and who seem to require exactly no effort to do so? The ones who often use those qualities to abuse and control others for personal gain, and seem to have a particular disdain for those of us who utterly lack any of that innate social acumen or had to learn it through hard work, and likely are able to recognize through logic what it is they're doing, and as a result are often resistant or even immune to their manipulations, with that likely being the reason for their disdain? Those are the people who were born with a user manual. "Regular" people got bits and pieces. Some only get a page or less. I got the front cover and nothing else. I know, and have always know, what it was I was missing relative to others. But seeing the cover of a book gives little away of the contents, and when that book is a guide on how to use something or put it together, the cover is so useless most instruction booklets simply don't have covers anymore.
What I'm trying to say is, good for you that you can do social interaction. Don't use that to lord over the rest of us like you're better. You're not. And you're wrong. There *are* people who are born with that knowledge. Just because, like me, you aren't one does not mean those people don't exist.
@Lucas Santoro I find your comment completely invalidating and unnecessary. The OP simply stated her POV, and you told her she was wrong. As an autistic person who was late diagnosed, I second her POV. I'm not saying anyone had it easier or was actually given a user manual. I'm just saying that it felt like everyone else was given instructions on how to act, but I wasn't.
im self-diagnosed with ASD. my psychiatrist said i might have autism but then diagnosed me with BPD because im pretty social. even tho i have like 3 symptoms that match BPD and none of them BPD specific (self-harm, depressive episodes, anxiety). so i made my own research, read articles, read about peoples experience, reflected on my behavior (and figured out a few thinks i never thought abt before), asked my friends. autism is often misdiagnosed as BPD so im gonna bring all this up the next time i see my doctor and i think she will agree with me.
how did it go?
Did it go well?
@@cca1834 i went to that psychiatrist a couple more times, she agreed that i might have autism but ignored the BPD topic completely. she suggested going to an ASD specialist but in that mental health center all of them were for children and costed 80usd+ for 1 appointment. i just didnt bother. then i switched to another specialist. new psychiatrist agreed that i do not have BPD and that i do have autistic traits. ive been re-diagnosed with PTSD, C-PTSD and generalized anxiety disorder.
@@giovannaputhumana8460 i went to that psychiatrist a couple more times, she agreed that i might have autism but ignored the BPD topic completely. she suggested going to an ASD specialist but in that mental health center all of them were for children and costed 80usd+ for 1 appointment. i just didnt bother. then i switched to another specialist. new psychiatrist agreed that i do not have BPD and that i do have autistic traits. ive been re-diagnosed with PTSD, C-PTSD and generalized anxiety disorder.
At 15 I was reasonably convinced I had Bipolar and ADHD I self medicated with massive caffeine doses in my last high school year. Got into uni, completely burned out, dropped out. Funked around for a few years developed drug addictions had a massive pyschotic episode and took myself to see a psychiatrist as a last resort (I had seen 4 others in the past and they were varying degrees of useless and unhelpful) my new shrink told me I was basically a textbook case of Bipolar and ADHD. Years later of various meds and I'm in a very good place but I'm still jaded about being told I was a stupid teenager for correctly assessing that my emotions and behaviour where not normal even for teenagers and I'm still jaded that I didn't have access to meds in school...
Most people don't know how to asses themselves well but if something is wrong and you don't like your DRs opinion, find another doctor. By pure chance the psychiatrist I saw who specialised in drug addiction treatment is also one of only a few psychiatrists who specialises in adult ADHD as well and as such is one of only a very few doctors in my country that can and will prescribe stimulants.
They kept me away from adhd diagnosis because I told them I require Amphetamine to have a productive day. It may be 2 weeks between buying a bit to get the house back in order, because I now limit my use for that purpose.
I had 10 years of taking every drug under the sun, but managed to shut the lid on all of them apart from speed. It never felt like a drug, just made me feel like what I perceived normal people to feel like.
All the random GPs seemed to hear was I take drugs everyday to survive.
It was only after seeing the same mental health guy at the clinic for three, 45 minute appointments that I actually got my point across, and a referral. I am now diagnosed.
as a medicine student i just want to say, that i'm so glad i found this channel so early on my way of becoming a doctor. You're pointing out really important things which were not covered during classes on uni. We're mainly focusing on all this scientific theoretic stuff (one course about comunication with patients is not really enough in my opinion, especially that time between it and moment when we'll graduate is like, more than 4 years) and some soft skills are kinda skipped because of the lack of time. I'm really glad i found someone who's mindset is so healthy and balanced, and can be a suggestion for me how i should think and behave as a professional health provider. I just feel like i can learn a lot from you sir, thank you for sharing your knowledge and giving me this opportunity
In my country it's very hard to get an autism diagnosis.
When you are a child, doctors are afraid to tell your parents, because of a cultural stigma attached to psychiatry in general.
Usually doctors see right away that something is "off" about me and give my mother a lot of autism literature to read, it's pretty obvious what they imply by that, but they can't be direct lol.
Not having a paper has hurt me severely, I spent 3 months on medications I was in no way supposed to take specifically because of autism.
I fit every single category in the dsm-5, my therapist believes I have autism, I have a lot of relatives who are very obviously autistic.
I don't care if I can't drive a car or own a gun, heck, I SHOULD NOT DRIVE A CAR OR OWN A GUN.
But because apparently those things are life ruining in some peoples eyes I can't have an official diagnosis, thanks.
Autism doesn't make someone unfit to drive a car.
@@ledumpsterfire6474
Tell that to the law makers TwT
Also in my case I legit should be restricted in driving, a fork falling on the floor near me causes me to shut down and sometimes scream, and roads are very loud, an ambulance existing in my hearing range already causes me to close my ears... I have NOTHING to lose but because people are so afraid of psychiatry in my country I can't have the official diagnosis
@@adish1401 Sorry, I probably should've rephrased that it doesn't inherently make someone unfit. I'm diagnosed and do just fine in a car, but most of my sensory issues are touch related, sound doesn't bother me unless it's really sudden, loud, and/or prolonged. I get that others do have more impairing sensory issues that might make driving dangerous. Really, it should be handled on a case by case basis.
if you’re ok with asking, what country r u from? your comment reminds me of my country (korea) where autism is veryyy stigmatized, criminals here sometimes claim to have autism (not sure whether they actually do or don’t) and so when autism is mentioned they either think of a psychopath or someone who is severely autistic to the point they need a caretaker 😂
Mental health workers not listening... this is a very real problem. If I feel like I'm not being heard, I drop them. And I don't care what it is about. Just because you had an experience in one way doesn't mean you can contradict what I'm telling you that I feel. I'm confirmed diagnosed with recurring clinical depression/major depression whatever they call it now. Also, sever general anxiety disorder. But wait there's more. I jump at sharp, sudden, loud noise. I didn't used to do that. No one else in the room jumps, not even my jump scare prone wife. Without medication I have extreme nightmares and wake up yelling. I have a 0-120mph temper... without medication. Without medication I am literally afraid to go to sleep because of what happens there. Without medication I have suicidal ideation to the point that I did have a plan. I had a very detailed plan that would 100% end me with minimal pain, a short moment of panic, and no guns with a messy clean up. I knew where and when I would do this, and what the weather would have to be like so I could watch the clouds in the sky. Of course, at the time I told no one about this as I was getting help and I'm not fucking stupid enough to get institutionalized *against my will*. It was only after medication stopped the suicidal ideation almost completely that I told people exactly what the plan was and that the only thing I had to decide was whether to do it. I won't describe it here, because it would glamorize it, and people who don't know about it don't need to be taught about it.
I have experienced lucid dreaming, and that's great when I trigger it, but it's not a guarantee. My dreams a extremely "real". I have smelled in my dreams. I see color in my dreams. I only feel pain in my dreams if I experience pain for some reason in the real world. One of the biggest triggers for lucid dreaming for me is if I get shot. I almost always realize I am dreaming at that point because I don't feel impact, I don't feel pain. I do feel like I'm dying, but once I realize nothing actually happened to me but an imagined bullet hole, I snap into lucid dreaming.
I experienced repeated large traumas (close family/friend deaths) at regular intervals throughout my life. I was never abused, but my therapist suspects I was neglected emotionally, though I knew my parents/grandparents loved me. I sometimes have episodes that resemble a flashback. Rarely if ever would I call them an actual flashback, but I am unsure especially if my mind gets stuck in the past and I experience all the same emotions. If one were to put me against a checklist for CPTSD, I tick almost every box, but I have not been diagnosed with that. What I have learned is that therapists tend to be very biased against non-violent trauma, or non-abusive trauma. Doesn't matter if your whole fucking family died and everyone you ever loved left or died. I get the impression that society as a whole believe that people can't be permanently damage unless they were physically or violently attacked in some way. And that's fucking bullshit. I believe I suffer from learned helplessness. Google that. My psychiatrist suspects I have hypnogogic or hypnopompic hallucinations. So yeah. I'm pretty fucked up. And ultimately, any official diagnosis is irrelevant because I have so many overlapping issues. Any amount of stress can send me into fight/flight/freeze. Real danger, however, results in focus instead of panic. I am not autistic though I feel like I can related to a lot of autistic issues. I'm very empathetic toward those people. I'm not AD/HD but I can relate to their issues. Mental illness in a human being can't be shoved inside some pretty little box most of the time. It's complex and messy. That is all. So my self diagnosis is something akin to CPTSD. But as I said it doesn't matter because all of these mental illnesses or disabilities have overlap. The only real objective measure of severity is how well can you function in life, how much do you think about suiicde. I've been in the mental health treatment system for over 20 years now. I have enough experience to have an opinion.
As of right now. I cannot preform activities of daily living. I just can't get it done. Regular personal hygiene, mundane housework, even paying bills is a fucking struggle and I have plenty of money. Traveling is a nightmare and I only do it for my daughter two or 3 times a year. So while I may not be able to diagnose myself without bias... I can certainly say that I am royally fucked up.
Took me a few years after high school to recognize my symptoms as depression and anxiety, and even longer to recognize my ADHD and how it exasperated the depression and anxiety. My life was pretty chaotic but when I was presented the information, everything kind of clicked and it lead me down the road of going back to school for my associates degree and finding a job with decent benefits. With health insurance, I was finally able to see a therapist and psychiatrist and was clinically diagnosed with all 3. It was such a weight off my shoulders to know that I wasn't just lazy or useless. I'm getting treatment and I'm now enrolled in school working towards my bachelor's. My life is in a far better place all because I took the time to recognize that my symptoms weren't normal, and then I did the research that would convince me to see a therapist. Would I call it a "self-diagnosis"? No. I didn't go around telling anybody I had anything until it was confirmed by my therapist. But to myself, I recognized how the symptoms aligned with each of the illnesses and presumed that I had all 3 until it was confirmed by my therapist and psychiatrist. I know how biases can play into these things so I was always open to the idea that a therapist might think it could have been something else or that there may have been other additional overlapping diagnoses. I just happened to be right.
As a first year psychology student I got good grades but it felt so hard and easy things like conversations and shopping were hard. So it was evident that it wasn’t a lack of intelligence or trying. I did research and adhd seemed very likely as all my life I have been told just focus. I did get evaluated by a psychiatrist and got the diagnosis. I often hear people saying that they only have one symptom and based on this symptom it’s adhd or after a certain amount of time they can’t focus so they have adhd.
i self diagnosed with autism a year before i could get my diagnosis. i knew people with autism, i read through all the diagnostic criteria and compared to other things i thought explained my problems previously (depression, anxiety & social anxiety, HSP (highly sensitive person)) and just ignored the problems i couldn’t explain (through all my time in therapy all the questions i got were confusing and i usually couldn’t give an answer unless my therapist helped to break down the question, give me options, ect.). but when doing my full dive into autism all those other options just merged together into one, clear thing that could explain everything. but to be really fair before i ever started therapy i was given a strange little paper that apparently was a pre-test for an autism diagnosis that was ignored after they said “you could have autism ngl”.
so i’m positive about self diagnosis, as long as you’re open to other explanations, incredibly long research that doesn’t only consist of using the internet and try in any way to discuss it with a professional.
You did the differential diagnosis part yourself. This is actually far more common than Dr K realizes.
@@SynthApprentice Especially with autism since a lot of us tend to hyperfocus on things and finding out stuff about myself tends to send me into a deep dive into various subjects just because they're interesting...
Though that of course would only apply to those who would self-diagnose more accurately in this case in the first place, so that doesn't **really** tell a lot about the general accuracy of self-diagnosis. I just wish everyone was interested in doing research into things potentially affecting themselves and those near them (not only behavior but identity-wise as well), would save a lot of unnecessary stigma overall.
i have that same experience with questions all the time
With mental illness it's probably a lot harder than physical ones, but i would say it's still valid.
Even such a simple and pretty common thing as asthma i had to diagnose myself at age 18, mainly because i always had allergies and bad breathing always attributed to that. But when i had an episode while sick with pneumonia and almost suffocated to death, that scared the sh*t out of me, and made me do my research and find a solution.
It still took way longer than than i thought it should to get officially diagnosed, but at least now i can get correct treatment and know how to not get into potentially dangerous situations because i know what do avoid.
What's frustrating to me is that I don't and have never functioned like those around me. I always thought it was... just my personality. However, when you have a lifetime of trying to do things that should be fairly easy and coming up short, you come to realize tha there's something off. Yet, because I've learned to mimic certain behaviors (for a short period of time anyway)... people are quick to say "nothing is wrong." However, I can only mimic normalcy for a short period of time and it's usually because I start things with a level of enthusiasm that dies out quickly, and so in order to maintain any sense of functionality I am constatanly starting over again. That means constantly moving, constantly switching jobs, constantly needing something new in order to do stuff effectively because once that enthusiasm dies out, I can no longer hyper focus on doing a great job, and soon it becomes mentally and physically impossible to do it anymore. A ton of people think it's just me being lazy and/or not caring, like I'm doing it on purpose... but I always fight hard to do better and try as I may this thing in me overrides what I want. During the pandemic I've done a lot of research on ADHD, and also read experiences from people who've been diagnosed with it since childhood and their life experiences read exactly like mine. I'm convinced I have ADHD and my psychiatrist is finally starting to consider this after a year of working with her. However, I am open to other possibilities...I really am, but what's frustrating is when a recent nuerologist just dismissed all my claims upon just looking at me and said, "There's nothing wrong with you" before even conducting a test. While I might not have the exact diagnosis right, this idea that this lifelong struggle is just nothing was disheartning given how hard I work to be "normal," an do every day tasks. I think experiences like this is what causes people to self-diagnsis. If you're living in your body and moving about in the world, you get a sense of whether or not something is wrong because there's data that stems from yourself, but also the data all around you... you might not understand what or why, but you understand there's something.
I also want to add that I landed on ADHD after ruling out a few other possibilities. I actually didn't even consider ADHD even though it kept showing up on searches because I had this stereotype of what an ADHD person behaved like... but with a deep-dive learned that there's a lot more to the condition, and that inattentive adhd looks way different from the more well-known symptoms of hyperactive adhd.
@@QueenSoap I've struggled to hold down a job my entire life because I always go through the cycle of mimicking normalcy for a few months and then I run out of the capacity to do it. I'm super enthusiastic and hardworking during the initial few months and almost everyone considers me one of the best workers. Then it becomes harder to pretend to be normal and i start feeling a sense of doom. I start dreading going to work every minute of my day and fall into a depressive episode. At that point, I can no longer smile, my face muscles won't do what I tell them to. People notice my behaviour is different. Then I quit the job and I need a couple months before I can get back my ability to act normal.
@@potatoking2217 Have you been able to figure anything out in regards to why this keeps happening?
I think that it's totally fine to say that you might have this or that mental illness but aren't diagnosed officially. Especially since it's really hard for a lot of people to seek mental health treatment because of price or availability. I'm fortunate enough to live in Germany where seeing a psychiatrist/therapist is free but you often have to wait months and months until you finally get into therapy.
Yes, I do wonder how many people would be self-diagnosed if diagnosis was easier to get. The only reason that I self-diagnose as autistic is that the diagnostic criteria were pretty well screwed up and there was only classical autism when I was a child. But, the psychologist thought that I've probably got Schizoid Personality Disorder, which despite its name implying schizophrenia, it's virtually identical to what used to be referred to as Asperger's Syndrome and the two names have often been used interchangeably at different times.
I've got a bunch of additional testing to do to try and settle things for good, but it's a massive problem as self-diagnosis doesn't bring treatment or legal rights, and the diagnosis that I could get doesn't cover me for any of the stuff that I would benefit from treating.
Generally speaking mood disorders are much easier to recognise by the sufferer. It’s the personality disorders with other severe comorbid conditions where it becomes more challenging. The person with chronic feelings or anxiety and/or depression does not really need to be given a rubber-stamp by a clinician to know in and of themselves how they feel.
Take two conditions often confused: bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder. Both are characterised by mood volatility and impulsivity, but with some basic research it’s easily to delineate the most distinctive features of each, particularly as the latter is concerned with identity disturbance (chronic, not episodic) and deeply ingrained abandonment anxiety/ paranoia. The trouble is that sometimes someone with a personality disorder may lack self-awareness, and therefore fail to recognise themselves as having a particular condition, or people tend to oversimplify by saying they are “depressed” when in fact this may be a symptom of a more complex condition.
I was living with my mom when I got diagnosed as a kid. She told my dad when she gave me to him to live with, but he did nothing about it. Someone in my family told me I grew out of it cause I’m “chill”, so I never thought about it cause I just thought that’s how it was. Fast forward to now, I’ve been doing a lot of research to find out what exactly is wrong with me. But nothing was really making sense. One day at work, I thought to myself “oh I was diagnosed with ADHD. I’m not hyper or anything anymore, might as well look into that.” It left me crying in the bathroom. My life could be so much different if my dad side of the family took it more seriously. I told my aunt I have adhd and got diagnosed as a kid, first thing she said was, “so you self diagnosed” lol
I self diagnosed myself with ADHD because I did the research and went to my general practitioner for an Adderall prescription. Turns out I was diagnosed officially when I was 12 and my mother chose not to take the doctors advice. I'm 34 now and just now finding happiness. I've got an official diagnosis appointment with the VA next week. I probably know more about my condition than my therapist will. Hyperfocus is a super power sometimes
I live in a rural neighborhood and have been on a waiting list of a psychiatric assessment for a year. Though I understand the importance of proper diagnosis, I think what needs to be addressed is also mis-diagnosis. Mis-diagnosis is an issue nearly all my friends have struggled with. I had a friend who got sent ot of the hospital twice because they did blood tests on them, said they were fine and their pain was just anxiety, and sent them on their merry way. Turns out, their blood tests showed that they were in the midst of passing a gallbladder stone, and after weeks of forcing themselves back into the hospital, turns out they had a severe hernia as well! Two other friends of mine got diagnosed with ADHD and anxiety, none of the medications they were giving were working, and after arguing with their family doctors to try and convince them that their medication isn't working, turns out both of them actually had autism. Finally, my little sister once tried to talk to my family doctor about getting an evaluation for mental illness, and my family doctor essentially said "well, you don't looked mentally ill so I don't see a reason to send you to a specialist."
These things actually happen.
Medical gaslighting and mis-diagnosis happens all. the. time.
So, in a world where information is at out fingertips, it is important to be a health advocate for yourself.
I haven't been properly diagnosed with ADHD, but I have done a heck of a lot of research, and will continue to use the resources I found that actually help me.
I haven't been diagnosed with OCD, but a lot of OCD resources have helped me with my crippling intrusive thoughts.
I spent most of 2021 in and out if hospitals trying to figure out what is wrong with certain parts of my body, and no doctor was able to give me an answer. Everything looks "normal," and thus, no one wanted to give me solutions. I found those solutions on my own (and with the one physiotherapist in my town that actually cares about my health and wellbeing,) that work, and make me happy and healthy and will continue to use them despite there being no "doctor approval.
I encourage EVERYONE to be health advocates for themselves, and take advantage of the resources you have, especially with you are like me and my friends, who live in rural places with shitty doctors and understaffed hospitals with ambulances that take approx 1½ hours to arrive at your door on average.
I self dxed with autism. I was advised to get tested multiple times by my pediatrician as a kid but my parents never tested me. Now I’m an adult and getting tested is extremely expensive. But my whole life I haven’t really understood the way other people communicate and I have only been close friends with neurodivergent people. I also have very intense interests, and weak sensory processing. I don’t think I have ADHD because I can focus quite well and have okayish executive functioning.
Nothing wrong with identifying symptoms as long as you dont go around telling people youre autistic
He gave some concrete examples of conditions that cause lack of focus, but that would be super hard to do with a life history of: sensory processing problems (sensitivity to sounds, touch, light); overstimulation; difficulty in social relationships that date back to childhood, strong interests of bordering on obsessive, etc etc. I'd be open to thinking that there is anohter way to explain all that!! I never saw an autism professional, as they were super expensive decades ago ( and not starting at my age). They were thousands of dollars back then. It actually has been helpful to me, not beating myself for being a certain way, and having more patience.
Probably one of the reasons why self diagnosis is so important for people (including me) ist the fact that getting a diagnosis at all takes ages if there’s so few psychiatrists and therapists in a country.
I’m recently self diagnosed myself with adhd (unattentive type) because I have most of the symptoms in a pretty severe form. I remember those symptoms all my life until now. Unfortunately, getting an appointment for a diagnosis seems to take at least a year in Germany. Likely even longer. Though before that I have yet to find a psychiatrist who doesn’t decline me, so add another few months on top of that year. So for the time being, self diagnosis is all I have.
And sometimes getting official diagnosis is impossible altogether, so self diagnosis is all you can get. Hate it when some prick online tells people to go see a doctor or their experience is invalid when they would love to, but they can't...
@@andollpony2227
Yeah, that‘s unfortunately the case. Especially because self diagnosing can actually lead to better understanding of yourself if done properly (by properly looking at any disorder that you could have and reflection on the past, including old documents).
I might have VERY good luck here, because I got an appointment extremely early, though that‘s not the case for everyone in Germany. Now I just have to hope that the diagnostic process works out to get the help I need.
From TikTok content I pursued an ADHD diagnosis and instead got PTSD. I was upset at first but am thankful because I feel like I was able to seek out specialized advice for my needs. Even though your channel is ADHD focused I do feel like it's helped me a lot with my inner voice. You and Dr Kirk Honda.
I self diagnosed with ASD about 6 months ago. I feel like if i mention it, i wont be believed because people will assume i watched a couple of videos and read an article when in reality ive been binge watching and reading everything i can on ASD while also asking my family and thinking on my childhood behaviours and habits. Ive even gotten second opinions going over the DSM5 with relatives because i often doubt my own conclusions. I often think that i cant have ASD, but i have so many traits and habbits associated with it. Its kind of become my special interest. I have everything id need shprt of a written accoumt to get a proper diagnosis except a doctor who diagnosis ASD in adults(very hard to find in my country), and enough money to pay for it. Getting an ASD diagnosis can be expensive. In any case my self diagnosis has helped understand my habbits and behaviours to let me live a healthier and better life. Id like to get a proper diagnosis, but as stated it would be very difficult. I dont need very much help either, id likely be "high functioning" so a diagnosis atm wouldnt really help much. I am also self employed, so that helps a lot.
"ive been binge watching and reading everything i can on ASD" -> Be careful to not fall into confirmation bias. You need to try and research alternatives as well. Try to ask yourself those two questions : "What symptoms do I have that would specifically contradicts ASD diagnosis?" and "What are some other diagnostics/conditions that could also cover the symptoms I experience?". Try to stay attached more to the symptoms and less to the actual diagnostic. That said, what you said about understanding yourself is still spot-on. Even if the diagnostic could be incorrect, the symptoms are there, and you have to deal with them. Understanding the symptoms better is nothing but useful!
Keep your feelings or symptoms in a journal. Also include the date, time of day, and when you take any medications. Then, note what you did that day. This is so you can say "I'm mad and feeling depressed" and check your notes to see what else might have caused it. Like watching a lot of news, or social media. Finally share your journal with your doctor. Your consistency and persistence hopefully will inspire them to take everything you say seriously, and you have evidence.
I have never been set in stone with my own self-diagnosis (physical and mental), I still want professional ones. But I am glad to know I did do the right thing and sort through differential diagnosis. I am in an odd situation where it's really really not easy for me to get help, so for 16 years or so I've been trying to research what I can and learn my own self to at least function. I focus more on symptoms than assuming I have one disorder or the other too.
It probably doesn't help that I slowly lost trust and faith in the help I did seek out either. No one really seemed to want to sit down and care, and that's on being unlucky and finding all the wrong people.
I appreciate you acknowledging that many Drs are not listening to their patients and can be arrogant. Not many would admit this and it is a real problem many are experiencing and as a result are losing trust and hope in the medical professionals they are trying to work with.
I’m an LCSW and this would be an excellent lecture for a course on diagnosis. I wish the public understood better the difference between a symptom and a diagnosis. Anxiety is common, and all healthy people have it as a protective mechanism. Anxiety disorders refer to an excess of anxiety symptoms that cause impairment of life functions. Similar things can be said about depression, dissociation, and narcissism.
I diagnosed myself with adhd because corona crashed our psychiatric system …and the few adhd docs in southern Germany just take new patients if you pay 500-800€ 😂
my brain never worked “normal” but I ignored some psychiatrists in the past with their diagnosis, because I misunderstood adhd completely… I’m so happy that my digital depression and deep diving lead me to adhd content like yours! I’m very thankful I feel like seeing light again😊🎉
Most people cannot diagnose themselves because they simply do not know enough. Even those with the knowledge can not see themselves clearly enough to diagnose accurately. Outside perspective is essential, especially when it comes to matters of the mind, especially disorders of the mind.
That said, mental health professionals do need to be aware that there are some patients who actually ARE incredibly well-informed and have enough insight to actually get it right. If you're a psychiatrist and only have 20 minutes to give a patient, that rare patient may actually be able to do you job better than you. If you gave them a full hour to ask the right questions, to take an adequate history, to discuss past responses to meds, you might actually be able to see this.
I've kinda thought I had ASD or ADHD, but then I had mentioned something after several sessions to the mental health professional that is provided through my university.
Well this one crucial detail about my bodily growth/development through puberty put a whole other perspective on my symptoms. He was able to pinpoint my issues to a syndrome that can have severe impacts on hormones and bodily development. Sure enough after a blood test we find that my body produces almost no testosterone at all. I'm not in a position to financially pursue this as much as I need to because I go to university so most of my money is spent on school. It's still possible for me to have something like ASD but it will be difficult to tell until after I get the biological issues tackled.
I feel it's important to note that you didn't set your mind on it, you were questioning, and then the medical professional did the correct steps after you expressed your questions.
I think you have to self diagnose these days to get decent health care, because if you don't all the doctors give you are the basic, most common 'causes/treatments'. I was going to the doctors for years about memory and cognitive issues and they just kept putting it down to stress or burnout despite it never really diminishing. It wasn't until I started doing my own research and walked in saying "it's either early onset dementia or ADHD" that they even got considered. Still took some convincing but I at least started to get referrals
This, is the sad truth. 100%. And if you think you might have a mental illness, go see a doctor who SPECIALIZES in that illness or you will go NOWHERE.
For a really long time i tought i might have ADHD because of short atention span etc. Reading about it on internet and watching some videos (tiktok is a plague of false information), so recently i decided to see a psychiatrist and she told half way in on visit that shes 100% sure i don't have ADHD but I do have neurosis caused by depression and it hit me like a truck, but when she explained everything made sense. So yeah being able to self diagnose some symptoms might point you in the right direction or at least going to check it with specialist like in my case. After all i am happy i went there and i know what i have to do to get better :)
Big issue with the diagnostic process is also doctors who have knowledge gaps and don’t have enough awareness to recognize that a patients issue might be concerning something they’re not too knowledgable about. I have multiple times throughout my life been in assessment situations over things that were in hindsight very obviously related to my adhd, even spending years in threrapy on two occasions for comorbid depression and for emotional dysregulation in my adulthood and still had to diagnose myself after having a friend tell me “hey, you should do research on adhd, your struggles sounds like adhd” and then spent years pursuing a diagnosis going from doctor to doctor to find a way to get assessed during corona. My therapist and me were edging close to the idea I might have bpd because of how my adhd manifested during a very toxic and messy relationship and it never occured to him to send me to get assessed for adhd because barely anyone even knows adhd has an emotional side at all. Another friend of mine actually was misdiagnosed with bpd for years before finding out she had adhd.
With some diagnoses, self dx is not just helpful, it’s also often necessary to getting an official diagnosis at all unless you’re extremely lucky. Where I live (germany) I think getting an adhd diagnosis as an adult without self dx’ing is pretty much straight up impossible.
I was diagnosed as a child and I still feel like an imposter sometimes. My diagnosis did help, it got the conversation started on how to take care of the problems I faced. However, the problem I found was people who didn't know how to help would get aggrevated with me not being able to do my work or asking for help. They would ask me in an aggressive tone what I needed to complete the task and my brain would shut down. This escalated the problem and eventually they would reach a point of threatening me with disciplinary action until it finally reached the point where they would threaten to call my parents. To me that meant I was about to be abused. I would then fill with energy and aggression and burst out in a long and seemingly thought out explanation of the issues I face. These were never succesful, and usually just lead to the teacher getting defensive and justifying their actions. Then I go to the office, where it doesn't matter what caused the problem, they ignore that and focus on the fact that I dared to escalate the arguement with a teacher.
All that leads to people ignoring the source of the problem and then I end up trapped in a cycle of abuse and mistreatment.
I self diagnosed ADHD. Later got 2 separate tests confirming it. However there was another tricky little bug at play that my doctor misdiagnosed that I correctly diagnosed. Not her fault, she didn't have all the information. I was diagnosed with depression. I actually have CPTSD. I felt like depression just didn't fit. I looked and looked into depression and even took the antidepressants for a couple days and I was just like no. I don't fit this criteria. I don't check a quarter of the boxes that would give me the diagnosis of depression. I didn't feel down. I sleep fine (when my ADHD or my baby aren't keeping me awake) I don't have loss of interest in things. I had emotional dysregulation from trauma. My entire life I've had it. It causes me to have some shame spirals when I would have a moment that hurt those around me. That's fucking human. If I didn't feel shame you better call me a sociopath. (honestly not sure that's the correct term for someone that would just go around hurting people with no regrets lol)
These videos are so helpful! Thanks for putting it out for free.
I wish medicine had an entire person diagnosis. It is SO hard to find doctors who are interested in diagnosing multiple seemingly unrelated issues.
Having a doctor that will listen to your worries is so important. It took me years to get my thyroid problems diagnosed because I also happen to have a previous diagnosis of mdd. My old doctor would always just refuse to even do the proper tests. Sometimes changing to a better doc can absolutely be what you might need to do in such situations.
As a kid and teen, my speech, learning, and socializing struggles were considered a part of my premature birth.
5 years ago, after struggling after college, I learned about autism, realized that was what I was, and learned how to self-help.
A few months ago, I got my official diagnosis from a mental health professional.
Learning I am autistic was one if the most wonderful things that has happened to me. I finally started learning how to be me.
When I was a kid, a teacher had said to my mom that I might be autistic but she didn't even consider it a possibility apparently... Years later I find out about that (casually mentioned in a conversation about childhood) and I went into looking into it and found out my personality fit very well into what was considered autistic traits back then... But I still kinda thought "that's just my personality" because I was taught all my life that it's a "horrible thing to be" and all the other bigoted stuff about it...
...I am still kinda bitter about it because my life has just constantly been shit all the time. I only learned to start accepting it a few years ago and only recently been more interested in researching it more intensely and taking officially used tests and looking for more content from autistic people - it's made my life a little bit easier but my whole family also has this adverse reaction to self-diagnosis. And I already have a kind of bad experience with medical staff in addition to hearing all the shit autistic people have had to go through with the system so I'm not exactly keen to go get diagnosed...
I'll still ask, do you think it's worth it? Did it help you to get an official diagnosis in any way, and what kind of experience did you have getting it? (If you don't mind talking about it of course)
Autism is just a developmental disorder, it's not the only one. I'm glad you were able to get a proper diagnosis. But, the other options probably wouldn't have made much of a difference in terms of treatment as it's mostly treating the traits that are causing issues in any case.
in my case all healthcare professionals have always been yapping about autism to me BECAUSE of my premature birth 💀💀in spite of me never relating to any of the symptoms 🙄
i was going to get an adhd evaluation, but then they decided to switch it to an autism evaluation without my input because "oh you're premature, how come you've never gotten this evaluation before!". the result was no autism, but "probably ADD". yeah i fucking thought so!
My disorders are profesionally diagnosed. But I couldn't have got there without learning about my condition on my own and knowing how to tackle it. Part of my trauma is iatrogenic from childhood psych, and I could never have gone back to psychology/psychiatry without a game plan. I avoid the phrase "self-diagnosis" in favor of "pre-diagnosis." A person is competent to describe their symptoms. A person is competent to make comparisons between those symptoms and other people's, and then go to their doctor and go, "I think I have W because X, Y, and Z." And even if they don't have W, they still have X, Y and Z and still need care. If it gets them into the doctor and helps them start addressing the problem it's only a good thing.
The danger is when someone never involves professionals, and especially when they then go and try and play doctor to other people. It quickly festers into a bunch of people not getting the care they need, doing unproven or unsafe self-treatment and the propagation of misinformation online.
Self diagnosis can be harmful since you can attribute symptoms to normal behaviors, but can be helpful if your parents don’t want to help you accessing a mental health professional, like when I had depression and trauma as a child, I wish I could have had help at that time because I was almost suiciding myself, I never diagnosed myself because I was seeking attention but because I really had something, that’s what’s matter, nowadays I know I have mild depression and delusional disorder with hallucinations.
Before I was diagnosed, I was pretty sure I had ADHD, but held that it *could be* a bunch of other things presenting like ADHD. However, I didn't need a diagnosis to benefit from using similar strategies to people with ADHD to help manage the issues I was having with inattention and organization, because even if I didn't have the disorder, I did still struggle with organization. You don't need a diagnosis to help yourself manage the symptoms you're experiencing, but you just can't get to the root of it on your own. I understand that it really fucking sucks that not everyone has access to Drs, especially a good psychiatrist, but that's an unfortunate reality of the world we live in and it doesn't make selfDX "valid" in any way.
Actually with sensory processing disorder it’s not easy to manage without professional help and some conditions require physical help. Like POTs and etc. if I have a fainting disorder or etc it’s not so easy to do that by myself. There’s also physical disabilities to take into consideration and sometimes it’s impossible to take care of a person without psychiatric or physical help.
And anything with hallucinations, like schizophrenia really needs professional help. Some people are unsafe without medicine that can only be prescribed by doctors.
Gosh, I wish my doctors were like you. I was diagnosed with ADHD but lately I've been questioning the diagnosis and this video really seals my thoughts on it, that it's likely been something else this whole time
Same. It's frustrating because I've tried a couple different times to get a diagnosis for whatever is wrong with my head and I keep getting different answers. First it was dyslexia (I can read just fine), then it was ADHD (I'm really not that disorganized and a few of the other symptoms don't really fit).
In fact, a huge part of my focus issue turned out to simply be tied to poor hearing, because the harder it is to hear something the more your brain has to devote itself to figuring out what pieces of the sound you missed and trying to fill in those blanks. This is why I'd have a huge problem paying attention to long lectures, but almost no issue at all if I could read subtitles.
I have friends who self diagnosed themselves with DiD and I thought I had it too because I'm was struggling with a lot of imaginary friends as coping mechanism. I was later on diagnosed with ADHD and persistent depressive disorder which I finally was able to work on with my psych and therapist. My dependence on the imaginary friends was lifted and it wasn't DiD.
Be careful with self diagnosis especially in extreme disorders like DiD or schizophrenia because it will change people's perspective with themselves for the worse and it will not help them in the long run to get the correct diagnosis and treatment
with DID especially, I created a headmate (dude as it likes to be called) intentionally (the practice is paromancy/tulpamancy/thoughtforms/imaginary friends considered sentient), and I can imagine that if someone diagnosed themselves with DID wrongly they could easily create headmates similarily to how I did only unintentionally. This could make them more sure that they have DID, and potentially harm them since plurality isn't for everyone and having the wrong diagnosis is also bad.
Basically, I agree that one(or multiple on the topic of plurality/lh) should definitely be very careful when diagnosing themselves with stuff like that, since the brain can easily create symptoms.
this is exactly the problem I've had when trying to "figure out" what I have, there's so much overlap in the symptoms between so much different stuff that you can't know just by checking 3 boxes that you *have* that certain thing, it might be insightful to be aware of the symptoms, but you can't pinpoint the root cause without a differential
currently deciding to go to therapy and eventually a diagnosis to have more answers and construct a way to work *with* it
I ended up being right in the end about having schizophrenia when I found out about it entirely by accident and then I didn't even realize I had half the other crap going on from it until I got in treatment and got help that everyone in my personal life was fighting against me with getting.
About 5 months ago, I self diagnosed myself with AvPD (Avoidant Personality Disorder). I tried for a good 2 months to get a legitimate diagnosis, but gave up when wait times kept extending, and appointments just kept falling through. At first, I wanted a second opinion to be sure that focusing on AvPD would be smart way of moving forward in therapy, but then I realized it doesn't actually matter. The reason I know I have AvPD is because even if somehow I technically didn't, it's such a useful and predictive model of my behavior and my complex patterns of anxiety that it doesn't even matter if it's "legitimate", it's just too helpful. I think one of the most telling signs that a self diagnosis is legitimate is if the diagnosis is a shockingly useful way of re-framing how you view your behavior, and if you'd be talking about all the same things even if it wasn't "legitimate".
I mean this is a lot like how we understand Physics. Does Newtonian Physics really cover all aspects of reality down to a quantum level? Does it cover general relativity? Not really. However, it's predictive enough to be useful.
That said, getting a deeper diagnosis might be even more insightful and might open a path to treatment.
People with a super, SUPER rare AvPD disorder don't self-diagnose themselves for obvious reasons, nor do they try to get diagnoses. This is just hypocritical and contradicts all of it. The only thing that has "improved" with your mindset is Munchausen linear thinking.
@@bunille you're ignorant
@@NikolaiWowe Stop projecting, munchie.
@@bunille You're not there to be intellectually honest in any way and it obviously shows. Look at you making a random diagnosis for someone you don't know, thinking you're better and gonna convince anyone. Absolutely pathetic and hypocritical as can be. Hopefully you grow out of that phase.
I mean, I'm a psychology graduate, I'm more than aware what harm armchair-diagnosing can do. But I'm fluent in reading and understanding research studies. When I was 12, I was diagnosed through official channels to have DCD. Now as an adult in my 30s, I am certain that I have ADHD in addition to DCD, and it got missed when I was younger. Women and girls with adhd are notoriously underdiagnosed, and DCD and ADHD have several overlapping symptoms and are frequently comorbid, so it would hardly be a surprise either. There's also no way in hell I'm coughing up £900 for someone to tell me what I already know, at least not right now, during an economic crisis. At least I can take the steps to try and help myself in my disaster of a life 😅 I think if you are already well-informed by doing all the reading and it's not something that urgently requires external help and treatment, there's no harm in self-diagnosis.
This is why I do a few things when I self diagnose. First off, I don’t brag about my potential disorders. I don’t say “I have this and this and that” because I don’t know 100% weather I do or not, and even when someone asks or brings it up, I don’t say “I have x” I say something like “I might have x” or “I have many symptoms of x”. Second, I always do months of research on all of the symptoms, what disorders those symptoms could be shared with and try to rule out the possibilities instead of jumping to a conclusion. I would love to get a professional opinion on the conclusions I’ve made about myself and my mental illness(es) but I’m a minor living with a single mom and we’re struggling to stay out of debt. America doesn’t really have all that adorable options for diagnoses, so for now official diagnosis is kinda just a hopeful thought for the future 😅
Thank you for helping spread this information because I love learning about things like this and I have a feeling you’ll be on my TH-cam recommended a lot more often now
I found your comparison between MDD and Hyporthyroidism interesting as someone who's been diagnosed with both. And presumably for me it is both, since I have blood tests consistent with Hypothyroidism and symptoms of MDD even when blood tests are brought to normal levels with medications.
After 20 some years of accepting what my family told me and being on my own and dealing with so called ADHD i got introspective and questioned every aspect of my life down to intentions and emotions of actions and im a firm believer i never had adhd but High functioning BPD or quiet bpd i watched 3 different vidoes within a month and actually cried each video i watched.
I self diagnosed myself with depression because I have had multiple intrusive suicidal thoughts for years and constantly had a hard time getting out of bed and doing simple tasks. I didn't know what it was when I was really young but I always knew something was wrong and when I finally found out the word for it, I dugged deeper and I found out the reason and the cause of it. And honestly it helped me because I started developing coping mechanisms and practices really early. It's still a struggle for me, but at least I know how to keep myself safe. It doesn't always work so I still have to really fight myself. But it does help me even if only a little because getting help is really difficult where I am because the topic of mental health is still very much taboo and it's too expensive to keep going to a therapist. Hell, some of them are major creeps and totally ignore boundaries.
I am about 99% sure it is depression but I'm not sure which type I fall under or if it is the only mental illness that I have because at this stage of my life, I have no idea what it feels like to have a normal healthy brain. I barely feel any emotions most days that I even wonder if I am truly happy about something or if I've just gotten too used to faking a smile or going along with the crowd so I don't stand out as the only one who could not react.
I began to strongly suspect I have ASD. The more I researched, the more it made sense. However, being a middle-aged adult, it wasn't easy to find a psychologist who worked with adults. Even my therapist couldn't recommend anyone.
I finally found one, and even with insurance, it cost me over $2,200 out-of-pocket. This is one of the biggest challenges in trying to get professionally diagnosed.
However, after a full evaluation and hours of testing, I was diagnosed with ASD and Alexithymia (which I had never heard of, but made sense once I read up on it).
Thankfully, I was privileged enough to be able to afford this, but so many others can't. Self-diagnosis might to happen as often if it wasn't so expensive to see the specialists needed for the appropriate diagnosis.
I had undiagnosed mental illness for years... I wish I'd self-diagnosed, because then I might have actually taken steps to manage it instead of having it negatively affect a significant portion of my life. But, then again, I didn't want something to be wrong with me. I just wanted to live a healthy, productive life. I definitely was one of those who found getting a diagnosis to be liberating, not only because it explained myself to me, but also because once I had a concrete understanding of what was wrong with me, I could formulate a plan for managing it, and now I have a healthy, normal life outside of maybe a few bad days now and then, which everyone has to deal with.
There's a difference between people who self-diagnose because they recognise something is wrong with them, and people who self-diagnose because they WANT something to be wrong with them (who are basically narcissists). The first kind are people who might be wrong in their diagnosis, but they're correct in understanding that something is wrong.
Also, you can really go a long time thinking that you're normal, then you hear people talk about living with mental illness or disorders or neurodivergent conditions and realize that they sound so much like your day-to-day life. I remember watching Trash Taste, and Garnt was recently diagnosed with ADHD as an adult, which he never suspected until he heard someone with ADHD discuss all their coping strategies for managing ADHD, and realized that he did so many of the same things, which he just thought were normal. It can be hard, if you've developed coping strategies your whole life, to understand that's not how everyone else lives their life. But the key is someone who doesn't want to be special or unique or get sympathy for having something "wrong" with them will always seek a diagnosis from a professional.
Can you link that ep? I stopped a while ago but now I'm curious
as someone who is extremely financially challenged, i completely agree that self diagnosis is not ok. it’s also just not fair that people can become whatever issue they feel is quirky enough, and gain all the “benefits” without going through those struggles. as someone with bpd and schizoaffective, it’s so tiring seeing people just randomly become these things from day to night
I agree and I'm glad to see more who think the same thing.
What I typically do is to reframe myself by saying what I feel right now instead of creating an identity or a truth of being mentally ill. For example I will say I feel depressed today for no reason, instead of saying that I have depression. Or I would say that I feel socially anxious when I'm with crowds or strangers, instead of saying that I have social anxiety. Typically frame it in its situational or momentary presence instead of something permanently tied to yourself. Because, although it can be misleading to self-diagnose, I believe it's still important to put into words the complex and often intense emotions that you go through. I live in a country where there aren't any therapists and any mental health help I want to pursue are usually the kind that would also offer medication, which I would like to avoid as much as possible to avoid dependancies, so this is how I frame myself while I can't be officially diagnosed.
I do want to say, thank you for making this video. I have pretty complicated and difficult to diagnose health problems, and have seen doctors all my life, and I have a lot of fear around going to the doctor now because of my experiences. But I need to go back. I haven’t been able to because I’m so stuck in this fear of being misunderstood and blown off by doctors. I’ve even been accused of malingering when I show up having done some research.
Hearing a bit about how doctors think and make diagnoses has really helped me. I think this will help me present my research, findings, and experiences to my next doctor in a way that’s respectful but also strong.
Personally I would really appreciate to be taught how to deal with the arrogant doctors who tell me I am healthy even though I complain about pain for over 20 years. What to tell them to actually make them listen to me. Also how to present my own hypotheses about my diagnoses.
No doctor will ever know me better than I know me. After my gf was diagnosed with ADHD, I did a lot of reading and research over a year before finally accepting that it seemed that I had all the symptoms of it too and decided to seek help. However, it's been a nightmare because of how dismissive every professional I've seen is and how outdated their knowledge is. I honestly feel like I know more about ADHD than the doctors I've seen (regardless of whether I actually have it). I've been told things like it's impossible for me to have ADHD as adult because I was never diagnosed as a child, or because I got mostly good grades. These are DOCTORS who specialize in this area! It's unbelievable how poor the overall quality of care is when it comes to mental health.
I assume you are probably a but more innatentive looking comparing to the typical adhd dudes. Its very hard for makes to get the "add"/adhd diagnosis. Even though its underdiagnosed in woman i think the more innatentive type is just generally going more undiagnosed more in men.
I've had similar experiences
@@cringeweebooo60 I haven't seen anybody talk about this, but it seems obvious, doesn't it? Inattentive symptoms are more subtle than hyperactive symptoms; it's very easy to make yourself look like you're paying attention even if you haven't processed a single word someone's saying.
I was getting skeptical looks because I was a good student with good grades. Because I could sit in chair and nobody was complaining about me but for me I got severe social anxiety and didn't want to draw attention to me even as child.
@@Chrokosaur It doesn't help that a lot of the evaluations are written with hyperactive adhd in mind. I had go get an initial evaluation with my clinic's counselor before being refered to the specialist. (Even then, I had to fight to make the appointment with said counselor. "You would have been diagnosed already if you had it. You wouldn't have gotten good grades in school. You wouldn't be able to sit through this phone call with me." I don't like contention, and scheduling that appointment was a nighmare due to how much I had to argue to advocate for myself.)
I am so happy that I researched adhd before getting that initial evaluation, because it was so skewed to one side of the spectrum. If I hadn't already researched and self-diagnosed myself, I never would have had the language necessary to get a positive on that evaluation. I had to give a lot of "No, I don't have that trait, but I have this instead," answers.
After I made it past that initial evaluation, I was sent to an adhd specialist for a more official diagnosis. She spotted my adhd right away.
No one but that specialist could recognize my adhd because everyone else thought of hyperactive adhd when they thought of adhd, which I don't fit. I was a very quiet and oddly patient child. I was far too anxious to be impulsive. I wasn't loud, and I definitely didn't cause any sort of disruption in school. Even as an adult, I am a rather quiet and cautious individual. I guess part of that is the autism (which my adhd specialist recognized and diagnosed a few months later), but much of it is because my adhd hyperactivity presents internally rather than externally. I in no way fit the stereotype of adhd, and that made it a whole lot harder to get diagnosed.
I self diagnose with autism. I swear the fact that my therapist diagnosed me with autism years ago doesn't have anything to do with that.
But autism is a neurological disorder, not a mental illness.
What
@@BlahajGoesNom what
😆
How did your therapist come to that conclusion? I'm curious because I question if whether or not Im on the spectrum
As a psychologist, our training on mental illness treatment and diagnosis is exactly ruling out physical illnesses to make a differential diagnosis. BUT IN PRACTICE - More often than not, when i refer patients to doctors to get them tested for things, the doctors throw the hot potato back to psychologists to "rule out mental illness" without doing anything :/.
Sometimes the excuse is that "the patient was anxious/depressed/inattentive so maybe that's the cause of if the symptoms" completely ignoring that having underlying health issues can lead to a degradation of mental health.
i did autism research for almost 2 years and was in denial for over a year. i accepted myself passively (by that i mean i keep it to myself and very rarely tell people, just in case i'm wrong). it has helped me a lot to accept myself and my flaws. as a psych student i have experienced firsthand the dangers and benefits of self-diagnosis. my advice to other self-diagnosers is to WAIT. give yourself a certain amount of time and come back to the subject and see if anything changes. this has happened to me, as over a year ago i seriously thought i had AVPD but after waiting about 9 months, the symptoms more of less got better on its own (not gone just not a problem anymore).
I'd think a psych student would know autism is a neurological disorder and not a mental illness.
@@Trahzy i know it's not a mental illness, but i'm talking about mental disorders in general
@@pikachufiknight Gotcha, well I think a good way to tell (besides actually going and finding out for sure) is to figure out how the symptoms have affected someone throughout their life so far. Autism doesn't come on later, or go away for a bit and come back like mental disorders can because it's just the way the brain developed before birth. So for people who are unsure or haven't struggled with the symptoms for their entire lives so far it's likely one of the mental disorders that have similar symptoms.
@@Trahzy agreed. i've struggled with mine my whole life so it helped me come to terms with myself, both in the present and in the past, and to better work on myself right now to not struggle as much. but yeah that is a very good point.
@@Trahzy not true. autism is most likely caused by environmental stresses during the two and half decades that your body is developing. there is no proof of it being hereditary. there is no real proof of any mental illness being hereditary. mainly because they dont do control groups when studying that stuff. like you would have to take a kid from a diagnosed person and raise them completely in a healthy environment before you could ever acknowledge hereditary mental illness being real. we've had over 100 years to do this. billions of opportunities with poor peoples children (we work/starve them to death anyways, dont pretend you have a moral issue with taking a few children from poor people and raising them in nice environments for scientific research lol) to do this and have undeniable proof of hereditary conditions, but never did it. its quack science that just tries to explain to rich people why everyone doesnt handle their torturous conditions by saying there are things wrong with them and justifying their poor living conditions
I think it's also important to recognise that a lot of people don't have access to a diagnosis. They may not be able to afford it or the waiting list to see a psychiatrist could be incredibly long. A professional diagnoses can often lead to discrimination and a lot of people who self diagnose actually don't get a proper diagnosis because the pros don't out-weigh the cons. I think if you have self diagnosed and that diagnosis is really helpful to you and you get the accommodations you need from it then I think it's okay.
How is that an excuse? I'm very happy that in my country professional diagnosis is required for accommodations and meds. Dont ruin it for people who actually suffer from a disorder/illness
@@thefridge7335 How do you not understand that you don't begin "suffering" the day a doctor writes it down on a paper? Plenty of people are suffering but they cannot afford a doctor, or they've been waiting patiently for years. Stop bullying everyone in this comment section ffs. We get it, you don't care about people and you think that only people with access to facilities have rights.
@@moxxiemaximus if saying "I suspect I might have x" is not enough for you and you need to label yourself as x when it hasn't been confirmed yeah I will make fun of you because plenty of people do that. Keep crying.
Literally how is it any of your business? All people are doing is using their self diagnosis to understand how to put systems in place to help themselves function more optimally. If you want to laugh at people for helping themselves, go for it. But you're out here actively bullying strangers in a comment section. You don't get high moral ground because "a lot of people would do that".
@@thefridge7335 you need to understand though that people who self diagnose don't just hear a brief description of the mental illness and go "yeah that's me". They do hours and hours of research. People don't self-diagnose carelessly. In a lot of cases it's "this explains a good portion of my lived experience and I've spend months doing research on it, but I can't afford a diagnosis or the diagnosis could do more harm than good (due to the stigma around certain mental illnesses or neurodivergence) so I'm going to live my life in a way that allows me to be happy and ask for accommodations when I need it" and not "Yh I watched like one tiktok about autism and I relate to it so I guess I'm autistic"
This is so cool. Tbh, i have a vitamin D deficiency, adhd, anxiety, and depression. I do however think some of these are causes of the others and could be attributed to things like exercise, diet, sleep, and well yeah the vitamin D deficiency. This is sosososo cool and eye opening. I want to go into this exact field and you are such a role model
Im glad that you brought up Bloodwork because i remember feeling like something was off and always saying how tired i was to the dr. but my labs were normal and just felt like it was maybe just “me” or in my head. Im trying to finally get a proper eval.
I don’t know what i have but i know its something. And its gatta get under control.
Yes, absolutely. I figured out I had BPD and finally got therapy - made my life much better.
I do think that the differential diagnosis part is the most important part of this video and I'm very grateful for this clear and easy explanation.
I never thought about self-diagnosing myself until a video about ADHD was about night owls and basically everything I did (and do) in my life started to make sense. In Argentina we have a large number of psychologists/psychiatrists per inhabitant, but it is extremely expensive if you do not have a paid health plan (and don't even count on free public health because they are basically non-existent),so each video is very helpful to me, they have really made positive changes in my life, and I believe that the day I can afford a specialist I will arrive with more knowledge about myself
i feel self advocacy is the most important especially with the american health care system and the disbelief in a lot of professionals and self diagnosis can be extremely helpful for that. everything starts with us noticing something in ourself and taking action. I would never judge someone in the system we have to take personal action instead of professional, as long as their lives as bettered for it.
I self diagnosed with ADHD and autism. Went to a professional and I was right. Gained practically nothing but a €600 invoice just to be told something I already knew. I understand that people shouldn't self dx based off of a single online quiz or a Tik Tok, but with things like autism, even clinicians have found the 90% of the time, the patient is correct in their assessment.
I knew I had clinical depression for years before I was diagnosed, I watched both my parents deal with depression for years and everything that I had experienced aligned with both their experiences and the research I had self conducted.
The reason it took so long for me to get a diagnosis was simply because I had too much anxiety about approaching a doctor about my issues, as soon as I did I was immediately put onto ssri prescription.
To this day I still don't get treated properly because my anxiety over getting medication and interacting with medical professionals outweighs my motivation to treat the issue I have.
Ultimately I'm stuck in a kind of dumb self imposed cycle of feeling depressed, knowing I need help but refusing to act, getting better after a few months on my own, still not seeking help because now I'm better I'd rather ignore the issue, getting depressed again after a couple of months, rinse and repeat.
Same honestly
Be very careful when self analyzing, and always get a second opinion. That doesn't mean just find someone who is willing to give you a diagnosis to validate your cognitive bias that you may have about having a certain illness or disorder. It also helps to keep in mind that it is much harder to get some diagnoses than others so a bad (or inexperienced therapist) might unintentionally ignore or discount the likelihood for a particular diagnosis. Do not let a therapist doctor tell you that you don't have something simply because it is statistically improbable, if they do that, get a second opinion from a more specialized or experienced source because just them saying something like that as a reason could very well mean that they can't give you an actually good reason for why you don't have that thing but they just aren't willing to bet their career on giving you an incorrect diagnosis.
I'm 54 and my favorite thing is mindfulness. Being mindful has helped me quiet my mind and manage my emotions. I also do the simple things to optimize my cognition, energy and mood. Which are getting regular sleep, best hrs 10 pm to 6 am. Eat mostly home cooked foods, mostly meats and veggies. Be active and exercise at least 3 days a week. Maintain water and electrolytes. Learn breathing hacks to manipulate nervous system. And my favorite happiness hack is to have a dream or big goals. Having a dream gives you something exciting to look forward to. Goals and dreams give you something to live for. Something to align and plan your time, mind, energy, and identity to. Something to jump out of bed for. This will also be a challenging journey to help you grow and mature. To realize your potential and get to know your authentic self.
The DSM 5 makes self diagnosis really easy and it allows for people to overlook underlying issues as to why they might be experiencing some symptoms
That's true for any DSM edition since all symptoms describe behaviors without addressing the mechanisms that cause them. Thats why only using 1 tool to diagnose mental illness is never good.
@@Ellaliluleloka
I have Bipolar and ADHD (neither were self diagnosed. I didn’t think I had any illness until I was hospitalized and then diagnosed) and people aren’t as good at reading the DSM as they think they are.
For example: I have heard people diagnosed/self-diagnosed with Bipolar II say something to the effect of, “I think I am hypomanic but my doctor/partner/family disagrees.” They then to proceed to list the symptoms list. But they stop there at the symptom checklist. If they continued to read literally five more lines further down the page they would have seen that those symptoms cannot just be subjective experiences, other people have to be able to notice a difference between those symptoms and how you generally act. Or that a doctor is refusing to diagnose them with Bipolar as they are good at “masking” there mania. But the problem is that if you have the ability to mask mania the intensity of your symptoms aren’t strong enough to rise to the level of mania. People only read the checklist of symptoms, which is usually half a page and not the other five pages of text that explains what they mean when they say “racing thoughts” for example.
Doctors make similar mistakes as well. For example, if you’ve been depressed for a long time you can actually forget what normal (euthymic) feels like. Then when they go back to baseline it looks and feels like hypomania to them. When these people tell their Dr how they’re feeling they tend to overstate their symptoms, an abundance of energy, increased socializing, more talkative, sudden interest in projects, they don’t sleep as much but still feel great, they’re moving around more, and so on. Well dang, that sounds like f-ing mania. The dr, who may have only seen you depressed, is hearing this and you are describing as beyond typical for you (because what you view as typical has actually changed) now thinks you also have mania. But you don’t, you just had depression. This is where we get into a situation where bipolar is both over and under diagnosed.
Difficult topic but you made it so insightful. The video title kept me from watching but I'm glad I watched it! I personally am kinda torn about it. I struggled for a long long time until I was brave enough to see a therapist again. I didn't come with a diagnosis into it, I just researched a lot. I thought I might be autistic but discarded the thought because I thought I was a pretty normal child. I had phases where I diagnosed myself with everything: NPD, bipolar, schizophrenia and so on. I wanted to avoid confirmation bias so bad but it didn't help at all and was so confusing.
The thing that led to my combined ADHD/ASD diagnosis was the lack of ANY sign that a physical condition could cause my struggles (I've been going through many different tests in the years w/o a therapist). We went through all possible psychological diagnoses. Well, those that made sense anyway, you shouldn't test yourself randomly on the internet and your doc neither, because if you did that, you would likely discover that you score high in some other disgnoses as well, even if they don't fit you when taking your history or other things into account.
But because I did and still do struggle with normal life, we concluded that ADHD/ASD or more likely just one of those (we're not entirely sure yet which one) is most reasonable.
However, I've encountered so many people who do not go through that process. They take random tests, score and then go "oh, that's nice, whoop, there goes my responsibility because I don't have this highly stigmatised diagnosis but this other one that I like more :)"
I usually try to tell people that it's not that simple and that they should differentiate. Sometimes I get really angry when people say "oh, yeah, I might be on the spectrum too :)" and then not further explain or name examples that don't make sense at all. In one case, someone wasn't happy with their borderline diagnosis and they do behave textbook-like just to not seek help for that and say "ahhh, it's probably just my adhd :)" or they are in a rare social situation which you can't prepare for because it just doesn't happen often and they go "ahh, I struggle so much with this situation, I'm just so autistic :)"
Things like that are so annoying because I don't struggle in specific situations, I struggle most of the time. To see people just "own" that diagnosis based on random situations ... I don't know. I really don't want to gatekeep, but it sometimes is so damn difficult to keep cool because I don't want to cause any harm. Any way, I'm personally okay with self-diagnosis if there is no option to see a doc and they take more than one possible cause into account, ideally you should then see a therapist or even someone specialized in that field. Only relying on a self-diagnosis can be difficult in some cases, I think.
I like how I got both a psychiatrist and counselor and I have confirmed AdhD but I continue to gaslight myself into thinking, well if it wasn't for a self diagnosis we would be here, guess I just don't wanna believe I have problems
I was asked by a few friends if I might have adhd.
One friend explained her experiences, symptoms and treatement etc, and having no idea about adhd, it resonated so much that i opted to get an assessment through the NHS.
I have yet to be assessed due to long waiting lists, I'm opting to go private next month.
"Knowing" what I have after years of cbt for cognitive distortions has liberated me.
It didnt however allow me to use ut as an excuse, it has actually given me a clear path that i can see ( alongside any eventual medication the clinic might suggest) to changing my problems.
I know i have likely got this permanent condition, but now I can actually see how to help myself, mitigate the problems it causes.
I am now optimistic, compared to before where I was just "broken".
24:00 THANK YOU! As someone who struggles with actual clinical diagnoses, I've bemoaned the destigmatization of mental health for this very reason, and I'm glad to see I'm not the only one. It's a fantastic thing to get empathy from people about things you can't control, but once everyone starts having self-diagnoses in attempts to get empathy from others (because we live in an empathy-starved society) that then has poisoned the well, as it were, for people with genuine clinical diagnoses. It's now SO socially acceptable to say "I have anxiety/depression/adhd" just because you're sad or flustered or w/e that it has come full circle in preventing people from genuinely understanding and empathizing with people who have real issues.
I actually watched Dr K's Adhd video and I self diagnosed myself and then I went to get a diagnosis. I think self diagnosis is important because if you're like me I've gone through my whole life wondering what's wrong with me. You lose hope after awhile and then with self esteem issues you feel like your life is one giant failure. Then compare that to a self diagnosis. I think it's worth it.
Edit- But I don't use it as a crutch. It's not an excuse. I still have high standards for myself but I won't beat myself up if I make a mistake.
Really appreciate you not just dismissing self-diagnosis at face value while still being constructively critical of self-diagnosis. Great video.❤
Thank you for talking about how doctors can miss things!! I have been struggling with finding good doctors that I often have to diagnose myself.
I had bad migraines for a long time, ever since I was a kid. All of the doctors I saw basically said I was faking or that they weren’t that bad because all my blood work was normal. They told me to drink more water. I did and still had migraines. Recently they started to get worse. I was losing feeling in my feet, had memory and balance issues. I went to a new doctor after I had exhausted all of my testing options with the others. She knew exactly what I had and ordered an MRI. Come to find out, I have a chiari malformation. She has one too so she knew exactly what my issue was! It took a doctor literally knowing my pain for them to take me seriously.
I went through the same thing with my fibroid. I ended up needing an emergency hysterectomy because none of the doctors I talked to ever listened to me when I told them I was in a lot of pain. Had a grapefruit sized fibroid in my uterine wall.
I also had to diagnose my gallbladder issues. I didn’t have the typical symptoms of gallbladder issues so the doctors kept telling me my pain was chronic kidney stones. It was my gallbladder, liver and spleen that were inflamed. Now I struggle with finding a diagnosis for what’s been attacking my gallbladder, liver and spleen for all these years. It’s been a fight for me to figure these things out. I was once labeled as “drug seeking” by a doctor because I insisted he figure out WHY I was in pain. I didn’t want meds, I just wanted to fix the problem!
oh boy "drink more water", if I had a nickle every time a doctor told me that.
@@Mpire101 Same!! It was nice to find out the source. I cried during my diagnosis because someone finally believed me! I feel like a lot of doctors want to blame the patient instead of finding a disease. Even though I was skinny when I was younger and still had these problems, they still get blamed on my weight. I wouldn’t have migraines if I lost some weight, etc. I was routinely tested by all the doctors for the “fat people stuff;” diabetes, blood pressure, cholesterol. when everything came back normal, it’s like they would just give up. They wanted to find something wrong with me only related to my being fat.
@@calestaiezu214 too many doctors for some reason believe you can't be overweight, a woman and disabled at the same time. I've heard this story a lot.