/sci/ - Science & Math » Thread #13762345

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Anonymous Sun 17 Oct 21:58:49 2021 No.13762345 View Reply Original Report

Quoted By: >>13762461 >>13762914 >>13763292

Let's assume that I have no way to get in contact with a psychologist for mental evaluation, but I suspect there's something wrong with me mentally.
Is there any unbiased (or mostly unbiased) way to self diagnose a mental disorder without falling into the trap of misinterpreting normal traits as symptoms of mental illness in order to fit your own view of yourself as abnormal?
So far the best way I have devised is trying to "step out of myself" and really analyze my day to day actions and feelings as if I were an outside viewer, but as I'm obviously the only one who knows about this, and thus cannot compare my results to anyone's but my own, I can't speak to its efficacy.
What do you think, /sci/?

Anonymous

Anonymous Sun 17 Oct 2021 22:49:19 No.13762461 Report

Quoted By: >>13765496

>>13762345
Read the DSM-5 I guess.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 18 Oct 2021 02:30:54 No.13762914 Report

Quoted By:

>>13762345
stay the fuck away from beezfeed

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 18 Oct 2021 03:27:43 No.13763027 Report

Quoted By: >>13763129 >>13763324

There is no unbiased way to get an assessment of your mental health at all.

Healthcare professionals have a self-interest in diagnosing you. They also are far more likely to diagnose certain demographics than others that don't reflect the relative diagnosis rates you see in studies under controlled conditions. You already have an idea in your head of your mental state, so will be bias toward seeking out things that confirm your existing conclusion.

Mental health diagnosis's are no more than social constructs to group together disparate groups of people under the idea that if you treat these class of people in certain specific ways and give them specific treatments, they will be helped whereas a normal person may not. Getting misdiagnosed is not a huge issue, it's just a waste of time and energy. Don't concern yourself with bias, just trust your gut. You can self-diagnose but it's a massive waste of time because if you truly understood all that you don't know, you would realise that googling medical information is a total and utter waste of your time compared to the expense and effort of finding a psychiatrist. There's no facebook quiz where you answer 20 questions and it tells you what's mentally wrong with you.

It's also a psychiatrist that diagnoses you, not a psychologist.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 18 Oct 2021 04:27:34 No.13763129 Report

Quoted By: >>13763304

>>13763027
The image was just a joke and an attention grabber, I've mostly just been comparing my own actions to known symptoms of illnesses, not literally just taking facebook quizzes, come on now.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 18 Oct 2021 05:49:56 No.13763292 Report

Quoted By: >>13766169

>>13762345
what do you think you have? sounds like you already have some bias

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 18 Oct 2021 05:55:52 No.13763304 Report

Quoted By:

>>13763129
Sure, and that activity might be helpful, it's just inefficient. A psychiatrist has thought about these issues a lot and received a good deal of education and thinks about such issues in a somewhat coherent and systematic way. Their patients do have better outcomes than people who don't visit them.

I should stress that I'm skeptical of the mental health field generally, if psychiatry is a real science, and if psychiatry has any positive benefit to society or only to people who are part of the "System". Still they essentially gatekeep government funding, insurance funding, psychoactive substances, and various other things. It's not that you can't self-diagnose, it's just the way society is structured, psychiatrists are the people who go to "how crazy fucks work" school and see thousands of crazy fucks and slang out drugs, so if you're crazy, you should go to the crazy person doctor.

Anonymous

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Anonymous Mon 18 Oct 2021 06:06:31 No.13763318 Report

Quoted By: >>13763323 >>13763364

I've been worried about having OCD, schizotypal personality disorder and BPD but I think I'm just pretending but I've been having really bad health problems and my doctor thinks it's due to the anxiety I feel and due to my intrusive thoughts, paranoia, health anxiety and magical thinking I'm constantly stressed and worried and sometimes I'm very panicky
I think self diagnosis is bad because it's just a form of attention seeking really, thinking you have any problem is attention seeking

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 18 Oct 2021 06:08:58 No.13763323 Report

Quoted By:

>>13763318
Oh it's also a good way to escape culpability from your problems

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 18 Oct 2021 06:09:39 No.13763324 Report

Quoted By:

>>13763027
What country are you in? In the US psychologists and even masters level counselors can diagnose.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 18 Oct 2021 06:37:49 No.13763364 Report

Quoted By:

>>13763318
You have to accept truth anon, if you actually have a problem acting as though it doesn't exist will not help you, the inverse is also true.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 18 Oct 2021 22:06:41 No.13765450 Report

Quoted By:

I can't write an answer right now, but give me some time and I will write a long answer about the possible pitfalls that I've seen myself when learning more about how to self diagnose

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 18 Oct 2021 22:22:59 No.13765496 Report

Quoted By:

>>13762461
>Read the DSM-5 I guess
This, unironically. Even the best experts ultimately defer to tests based on the DSM criteria.

You could look up specific screening tests/surveys, but even if you apply them fairly and even diagnose yourself with depression, and be 100% correct about it, it doesn't matter. If you don't have access to medical resources, a medical diagnosis does basically nothing, especially when the disease is usually treated with meds+therapy+fixing life "choices", only the last of which you can reliably do by yourself. In a lot of cases, it's just the docs trying to take the edge off and keep you from killing yourself until you eventually unfuck yourself.

Unfortunately, most online resources concerning how to alter your life choices/way of thinking in specific ways are hit or miss. Not only are a lot resources not rooted in fact, but even the ones that are focused on either the generalized case, or the "average" case. The former are not usually written in a way easy for patients to digest, and from your perspective, it's probably not much different to a dozen random retards/family members saying, "stop thinking so hard about how you appear to others" or "just stop being depressed lmao" or some other usually useless shit. Some of it may apply to you, but you probably won't know which, and it's often impractical to try everything. The latter, "average" case is of little use to you, since you're not "average", in the same sense that no family has the average 2.3 children.

All you can do is attempt to follow the usual, general, physical best practices like "eat well", "exercise", "socialize and keep in touch with your family", etc. The docs will tell you this anyway, in addition to any other treatment they give you. Then...tough it out. Hold out until either you get access to help, or until the problem resolves itself.

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 19 Oct 2021 00:38:32 No.13766169 Report

Quoted By: >>13766237 >>13767055 >>13767488 >>13767543

>>13763292
I don't really know entirely. I have a good number of the symptoms of bipolar disorder, depression, and sociopathy, and some of the symptoms of paranoid and schizoid personality disorders.
The issue I run into is that a lot of these "symptoms" are often for minor things in my life. For example: I often get impulses to treat other people poorly, or to just do whatever I feel like regardless of consequences. This is one of the symptoms of sociopathy, and it's coincidentally one of the aspects of my personality I make a strong attempt to put down. Is just thinking about doing bad things constantly a mental illness? If it never really amounts to anything, and is just on a small scale, and I put down those emotions almost every time, is it an illness or am I just an asshole by nature?
This is the problem I struggle with, if I decide that it's too little to go off of, and that I'm perfectly fine, I might be writing off something that is only small now, but might get worse. If I decide that it's a full blown illness I might convince myself that I'm fucked in the head and that would change my behavior, and I could start justifying bad choices and making up excuses for my own failings, that and taking on traits that I don't and never had in the first place to suit my own view of myself as "mentally ill". People do this sort of thing all the time.

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 19 Oct 2021 00:47:23 No.13766237 Report

Quoted By:

>>13766169
Also, for reference, these sort of traits run in my family. My mother, grandmother, and both my sisters have most of the same shit that I have described in this post but worse, my brother is a felon, which I think should speak for itself considering that 56% of state prisoners, 45% of federal prisoners, and 64% of jail inmates have mental illnesses. My other brother seems to be the only mostly normal one out of us, but even then, he's got his colorful characteristics.

Anonymous

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Anonymous Tue 19 Oct 2021 04:52:39 No.13767055 Report

Quoted By: >>13767102

>>13766169
Well, first of all I should clarify that I am not a mental health professional. I have never taken a psychology course even, but I have a passing interest in mental illnesses and I have tried to improve my self-diagnosis to present my problems more quickly to potential therapists.
I am going to write a long ass reply, but the fact that you think you have both bipolar disorder and depression is already a sign that you are fucking up the diagnosis. You can't have both. Either you have the usual depression (called unipolar depression sometimes) or you have bipolar disorder and are currently going through a depressive period (called bipolar depression). The distinction is important because they have a different treatment. If you treat bipolar depression as if it were unipolar depression (with antidepressants basically) then there is the risk that the person will switch to the other extreme and develop mania or hypomania.

With that in mind, here are some things that I have learned while trying to do a self-diagnosis
-We are not experts, so we have to follow the DSM-5 carefully. I would suggest that you look it up and try to determine if you meet the criteria for the disorders you believe you have. The criteria are usually a minimum amount of symptoms, a minimum duration of those symptoms (i.e. 2 weeks for depression), distress and severe interference in different spheres of life.
-There are usually several possible explanations for a single symptom. For example, if someone has problems concentrating, laypeople would think of ADHD, but it can also be caused by depression and by anxiety. Mood swings make people think of bipolar disorder, but they can also mean borderline personality disorder or atypical depression if I am not mistaken. Being withdrawn can be caused by fear of rejection, lack of interest or distrusting people. This process is called a differential diagnosis. You can look up the differential diagnosis of every disorder you think of.

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 19 Oct 2021 04:57:06 No.13767073 Report

Quoted By:

Study behaviorism and probably kabbalah to understand both how linguistics and behavior work in tandem to produce the cause and effect social order that currently exists today.

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 19 Oct 2021 05:04:00 No.13767102 Report

Quoted By: >>13767172

>>13767055
-Pretend that you don't know a damn about all the different mental illnesses and you have to learn about them from scratch. People have so many misconceptions about what depression, bipolar disorder, ADHD and OCD are for example that they might as well pretend they don't know a damn. Symptoms have to actually be severe and cause distress or interfere with your life. Smiling and crying 1 hour later is not bipolar disorder. Being tidy is not OCD. Feeling down for 3 days is not depression. Follow the DSM-5 criteria rigorously.
-Avoid overdiagnosing yourself. Assume as little disorders as you need to explain your symptoms. If you worry a lot about social situations, but it turns out that you worry a lot about everything else as well and social situations are not particularly salient, then you don't have social anxiety (SAD) and generalized anxiety (GAD), only GAD. If you have problems concentrating, insomnia and depressed mood, chances are you only have depression and not ADHD, insomnia and depression.
-Learn about the usual age of onset. If schizophrenia usually starts in adulthood but you believe you have it since you were 12, then you are probably wrong. Earlier onset is usually associated with a worse outcome. Also, if you believe you have autism or ADHD but never showed any symptoms when you were younger, you could be wrong.

Anonymous

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Anonymous Tue 19 Oct 2021 05:28:17 No.13767172 Report

Quoted By: >>13767409

>>13767102
-It is not uncommon at all for a person with one disorder to have multiple disorders. This is called comorbidity. Some combinations are far more common than others. If you think that you have depression and anxiety, then you might very well be right (I believe the comorbidity between the two is 40-60%). On the other hand, I see an issue with your self-diagnosis of personality disorders. It is not uncommon to have more than one. However, the comorbidity between antisocial personality disorder (which you call sociopathy), schizoid and paranoid personality disorders is low (see pic related). I don't know a damn about those three personality disorders but the low comorbidity already makes me believe you are wrong. Check comorbidity rates to see if all your disorders actually come together often.
-You need to make sure that you understand every key word in the DSM-5 right. My psychologist said I had obsessive compulsive traits and I found it hard to believe because perfectionism was a key trait and I didn't think I had it. I thought that perfectionism was about overworking so that everything looks great and I am a slacker. It turns out that perfectionism was about unrealistic standards that affect your self-esteem when you don't meet them and you can be a slacker, and I do have that. I didn't know what adherence to "rules" meant and thought I didn't have it, but it turns out that whenever you think "I have to" or "I must" you are implicitly adhering to a rule and I did that too. Make sure you understand such key concepts in the disorders you suspect (i.e. magical thinking, intrusive)
-Just as you might overdiagnose yourself to confirm your thoughts about being abnormal, you could end up skipping a possible diagnosis because you don't like the label. My psychologist at some point suspected I might have autism and the idea that I could have legit autism made me go in denial. I imagine this is more common when you are diagnosed by someone else though.

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 19 Oct 2021 06:52:04 No.13767409 Report

Quoted By: >>13767423

>>13767172
-Now, when it comes to normality vs abnormality, I struggle with this part as well. I would simply suggest to ignore whether a "problem" is uncommon and to just focus on the issues that it is causing you in your life. Does it cause significant distress? Is it something that you definitely feel like you should solve or are you for the most part okay with it? Also, is it interfering in important ways in spheres of your life (school, work, friendships, romantic relationships)?
I'll give you an example. I believe I have social anxiety. There are several ways it has interfered with my life: I have failed labs because I feared making a fool of myself, I avoided giving presentations in school and got bad grades, I would go hungry because the idea of eating in a restaurant scared me, several girls got interested in me and told me so but I didn't do anything even though I liked them too because I was scared, I even failed a class among other things because the idea of taking a selfie was too hard. Those are several ways in which my fear of criticism and rejection has caused me problems. If you truly have a mental illness, then after some effort and analyzing your past you should be able to find instances where it has actually caused you problems, even if they are not as dramatic as mine. In the case of social anxiety for example, something like feeling miserable, frustrated and performing much worse in your job because of your anxiety in public speaking might be enough to qualify for the diagnosis.
-Look up what it is like to live with a given mental disorder (like "what is living with bipolar disorder like"). You want to see examples of people that have actually got the diagnosis to see if they are similar to you. That also solves the problem of not knowing if your symptoms are severe enough to deserve a diagnosis
-Look up a book about abnormal psychology (study of mental diseases). I found one called "Abnormal Psychology, an integrative approach" by Barlow."

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 19 Oct 2021 06:58:49 No.13767423 Report

Quoted By:

>>13767409
I think that you can already tell that reaching an accurate diagnosis is difficult. The advantange of working with a psychiatrist is that they can reach in an hour and with a good degree of confidence a diagnosis that would take you several weeks to reach with the same confidence.
You don't have to follow every single advice that I gave you, but I believe that the more suggestions you follow, the more likely it is that your diagnosis will be accurate. Take my advice with a grain of salt though.

Anonymous

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Anonymous Tue 19 Oct 2021 07:27:46 No.13767488 Report

Quoted By:

>>13766169
Just a couple more things. You say that you get "impulses", but what you say makes me believe that you are having some kind of thoughts that you dislike and try to shun. They might be intrusive thoughts (pic related). If that's the case, then it would be a mental illness only if they are frequent enough and cause enough distress. Doing "whatever you feel like regardless of the consequences" is pretty ambiguous too (what consequences? Trouble with the law? Making enemies? Or fucking up your life by making bad decisions?) and could very well have to do with depression in the latter case and not with sociopathy
I would like to know why you don't want to go to a mental health professional though and also why you suddenly feel like you might have several mental disorders.
The fact that you consider most of the symptoms to have to do with minor things in your life and not with severe interference makes me believe that you don't qualify for the vast majority of those diagnoses (maybe depression and perhaps some anxiety problem that you didn't mention, because both are rather common), but like I said, I am not a professional so take it with a grain of salt.

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 19 Oct 2021 08:07:32 No.13767543 Report

Quoted By: >>13767737

>>13766169
>You have the symptoms of bipolar syndrome and depression

The two conditions are mutually exclusive. You're either manic or you aren't.

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 19 Oct 2021 09:59:29 No.13767737 Report

Quoted By:

>>13767543
Bipolar 1 is mania with major depressive episodes.
Bipolar 2 is hypomania with major depressive episodes.

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