like i apologize for this
Okay I totally understand that going onto someone’s blog and seeing mental illnesses listed as if they are trophies is really annoying. Because of this you assume that they are proud, use them as a crutch, flaunt them. To be honest, I don’t get it either.
But self diagnosis isn’t reading something online and telling everyone you have it and using it as a crutch. You assume that people experience a couple of “symptoms” and are in a rush to diagnose themselves, this is not true. One time I heard muffled voices in my head and thought I might be schizophrenic because I looked it up and some of the symptoms fit me, a lot of them did. It freaked me out for like 3 days, then I forgot about it. That’s what you’re all assuming self diagnosis is, it isn’t.
When I was depressed at 15, I can’t even fucking explain. It wasn’t that “I noticed some symptoms”, it was that I wasn’t myself to a level that it frightened me. My mind was a blur, my thoughts were racing constantly, I was so hopeless, I was empty and I didn’t feel anything, I had this sense of impending doom like I was going to die. I didn’t know why and it came sudden. I felt like this for a while before I even started to wonder about it. I wondered if I was crazy, if I was having delusions, if I was losing my mind. I had read about depression many times and I didn’t make the connection, even when I read about it AGAIN while I was experiencing the symptoms, because my prior perception of what depression would feel like was distracting me from reading the symptoms in light of what I was feeling right then. It took me maybe 5 months of feeling that way to realize I probably had depression. No I didn’t put it on my blog, no I didn’t tell anyone, no I didn’t even think “I have depression”, I thought “I might have depression, but there’s something wrong regardless”. What the fuck is wrong with that. What difference does it make if I went to a doc and they said “yea you have depression”?? Like my illness was suddenly legitimate, and it didn’t exist before they said that? I was still depressed in the same way and still not getting help.
I got told my a doctor I had anxiety when I was 15, before depression, she didn’t write it in my file or anything, or offer me any options other than “focus on relaxing”. She’s a lovely person and good doctor and I’m not saying she should have given me drugs or therapy, but that’s my point - told a doctor what was happening, she told me it was a panic attack and it sounds like I have anx. It clicked, nothing changed from then on except I knew I had anxiety. If I had given it a few years I would have known that for myself, and things would be the exact same. What’s the damn difference.
The thing is, doctors don’t have magical encyclopedia diagnostic minds that can scan you and give a diagnosis. With mental illnesses a lot of it is just guess work from a group of symptoms if they think you’re being legit, and why do people think mental illnesses are so rare that so many people lie, and so many people who think they have them don’t actually? There are no screening tests for most, if not all mental illnesses. They are not like physical illnesses where you test for a bacterium or a cancerous growth, so stop saying “you wouldn’t self diagnose cancer!!”, because diagnosing a mental illness involves a couple of minutes of talking, and if they even know anything about the illness and they think you’re being truthful, they agree with you. It’s literally just slapping a label on some symptoms, because depression is different for different people as is anxiety. Mental illnesses aren’t well-defined like physical, there is a lot of grey area, which is why many mentally ill people often have more than one illness.
I understand why diagnosing personality disorders and things like autism is more difficult, but there must be people out there who have such a strong believe they have it otherwise they wouldn’t self Dx. When people self Dx lightly, they usually forget about it in a few days or weeks, like I did which schizophrenia.
