No it wouldn’t. It’d turn a disorder into a toy. Stop.
Nah, I work with a few psychiatrists and I’m well aware of the DSM 5 dx criteria.
I’ve got Schizophrenic patients, I’ve got Borderline personality patients, I’ve got Lewy Body patients, etc… there’s oodles of different criteria for each. Different behaviors, different treatments and different causes.
Sounds like you are one of the good ones, but wouldn’t you rather back up any diagnosis, if possible, with hard evidence like a test that can tell you if you have the gene that predisposes you to schizophrenia? At the least it could rule out that kind of misdiagnosis.
You can and you can’t.
Genetics can identify factors that predispose you towards something, but just because your predisposed towards something doesn’t mean your going to get that illness, with some obvious exceptions like huntingtons disease.
For Schizophrenia (Schizoaffective disorder or just regular schizophrenia) there’s certain criteria you look for, with the main one being false interpretations of their surroundings that a normal person would not accept in most circumstances. The “hearing voices” is actually super rare. It’s usually delusions.
Something like Lewy Body can be diagnosed from Schizophrenia even if the patient is having Schizophrenic symptoms by some things like Parkinson like tremors, which is also not enough to diagnose by itself, but after you get multiple things you can start narrowing down what it can and can’t be. In this case, if I can’t figure out a good reason for those tremors, it looks less and less like Schizophrenia, even though they might have multiple symptoms of Schizophrenia.
When you get to something like Alzheimers though you can only diagnose it by ruling out most everything else or performing an autopsy (which is frowned upon with a living patient!)
TLDR it’s complicated, but you can usually suss it out with a significant amount of observation. And most things are treatable now, not curable in most cases, but treatable.
But it’s very much worth saying, that the worst treatments we use now, are MUCH better than the best treatments from even just 50 years ago. In one of my clinicals I had a patient who got a lobotomy (in the 1950’s to be clear). That was just… so cruel.
1 Like
I love your post! I wish there is a way to thumbtack this.
1 Like
Thank you 
I don’t think there is a way to pin threads, even to your personal profile.
Feel free to bookmark it maybe? If you ever need to use it, you can click the chain link part at the bottom of my post and copy paste the link to it.
If you don’t have TL3 rights on this forum, you can highlight the link in your post the use the preformatted text feature that looks like </>