Misdiagnosis Quotes

“God whispered," You endured a lot. For that I am truly sorry, but grateful. I needed you to struggle to help so many. Through that process you would grow into who you have now become. Didn't you know that I gave all my struggles to my favorite children? One only needs to look at the struggles given to your older brother Jesus to know how important you have been to me.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Eighty two percent of the traumatized children seen in the National Child Traumatic Stress Network do not meet diagnostic criteria for PTSD.15 Because they often are shut down, suspicious, or aggressive they now receive pseudoscientific diagnoses such as “oppositional defiant disorder,” meaning “This kid hates my guts and won’t do anything I tell him to do,” or “disruptive mood dysregulation disorder,” meaning he has temper tantrums. Having as many problems as they do, these kids accumulate numerous diagnoses over time. Before they reach their twenties, many patients have been given four, five, six, or more of these impressive but meaningless labels. If they receive treatment at all, they get whatever is being promulgated as the method of management du jour: medications, behavioral modification, or exposure therapy. These rarely work and often cause more damage.”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

“Conviction rates in the military are pathetic, with most offenders going free AND THERE IS NO RECOURSE FOR APPEAL! The military believes the Emperor has his clothes on, even when they are down around his ankles and he is coming in the woman's window with a knife! Military juries give low sentences or clear offender's altogether. Women can be heard to say “it's not just me” over and over. Men may get an Article 15, which is just a slap on the wrist, and doesn't even follow them in their career. This is hardly a deterrent. The perpetrator frequently stays in place to continue to intimidate their female victims, who are then treated like mental cases, who need to be discharged. Women find the tables turned, letters in their files, trumped up Women find the tables turned, letters in their files, trumped up charges; isolation and transfer are common, as are court ordered psychiatric referrals that label the women as lying or incompatible with military service because they are “Borderline Personality Disorders” or mentally unbalanced. I attended many of these women, after they were discharged, or were wives of abusers, from xxx Air Force Base, when I was a psychotherapist working in the private sector. That was always their diagnosis, yet retesting tended to show something different after stabilization, like PTSD.”
― Diane Chamberlain, Conduct Unbecoming: Rape, Torture, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from Military Commanders

“Sadly, psychiatric training still includes far too little on the very serious psychiatric sequelae of childhood trauma, especially CSA [child sexual abuse]. There is inadequate recognition within mental health services of the prevalence and importance of Dissociative Disorders, sufferers of which are frequently misdiagnosed as Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), or, in the cases of DID, schizophrenia.

This is to some extent understandable as some of the features of DID appear superficially to mimic those of schizophrenia and/or Borderline Personality Disorder.”
― Joan Coleman, Attachment, Trauma and Multiplicity: Working with Dissociative Identity Disorder

“Psychologisation describes the emphasis on psychological factors where there is little or no evidence to justify it (1). It's a process where relevant findings are ignored or downplayed in favour of data from incomplete examinations, flawed research or anecdotal reports.
In a clinical context, differential diagnoses may be dismissed prematurely while psychological explanations are readily accepted.
Psychologisation does not refer to situations where there is sound evidence that psychological factors play a significant role, or where all the arguments are discussed and the psychological explanations are deemed the most persuasive.”
― Ellen Goudsmit

“There needs to be a nationwide awareness programme for all NHS staff, to educate them about dissociative disorders. Diagnoses need to be more obtainable within the NHS; people's lives should be placed ahead of funding restraints and bureaucratic red tape. We need minimum standards of care and treatment agreed and implemented within the NHS to end the current nightmare of the postcode lottery—not just guidelines that can be ignored but actual regulations.”
― carol broad, Living with the Reality of Dissociative Identity Disorder: Campaigning Voices

“In my series, five percent presented self-diagnosed. In most cases, this was not believed by the initial clinician.

I had the following unnerving experience. Prior to my first multiple personality disorder case, I did not think the condition existed. I saw a young woman who claimed to have multiple personality disorder, and dismissed her claim. She never mentioned it again. Seven years later, while doing research in multiple personality disorder, I asked her to be a control subject for a new multiple personality disorder screening protocol, since I believed she was a medication-controlled paranoid schizophrenic. A protector personality rapidly took over, cursed at me for disbelieving the patient in the first place, introduced me to other personalities, resumed control, and chastized me vehemently at great length. Thereafter, she left, never to return.”
― Richard P. Kluft, Childhood Antecedents of Multiple Personality Disorders

“DID survivors are failed twice: once at the initial point of their abuse/trauma and again when the system fails to acknowledge their needs, even doubting their diagnosis if they have been fortunate enough to obtain one. This cannot be right in the twenty-first century.”
― Joan Coleman

“The symptoms of trauma and ADHD are often confused.”
― Jessica Marie Baumgartner

“Some psychiatric clinicians appear to be so biologically or behaviorally oriented that they do not believe in the unconscious. Others have been so indoctrinated in the Freudian psychoanalytic model that they believe all accounts of incest are fantasy. A few of the older clinicians allow pride to get in their way and refuse to believe that they may have missed the diagnosis [of Dissociative Identity Disorder] in some of their patients.”
― Philip M. Coons

“Many MPD patients have spent years in unproductive therapies based on the assumption that they were borderlines.”
― Donald R. Ross, Multiple Personality Disorder: Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 12.1

“Based on our own experiences, we know that despite the many challenges DID brings, with the right understanding, help, and treatment, all DID survivors can have a better future. So surely having to fight constantly for recognition, for understanding, and for funding to access the right care and treatment is utterly wrong.”
― Joan Coleman

“There is no specific test for multiple sclerosis. Its early symptoms - fatigue, loss of sensation, weakness and visual changes - are frequently misdiagnosed as psychoneurosis or an even more severe psychiatric disorder, such as hysteria, particularly in women.
When doctors could find no organic cause for [Jacqueline Du Pré's] complaints, they prescribed a year's rest, and referred her to a psychiatrist... When she consulted a doctor in Australia about her tenacious fatigue and occasional double vision in her right eye, he dismissed her symptoms as "adolescent trauma" and suggested she take up a relaxing hobby.”
― Carol Easton, Jacqueline du Pré: A Life

“hospital: (n.) where the healthy go to get misdiagnosed and the sick go to get mistreated.”
― Sol Luckman, The Angel's Dictionary

“It is clear that we cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric hospitals. The hospital itself imposes a special environment in which the meanings of behavior can easily be misunderstood. The consequences to patients hospitalized in such an environment-the powerlessness, depersonalization, segregation, mortification, and self-labeling-seem undoubtedly countertherapeutic.”
― David L. Rosenhan

“Astronomy management teams not informing me about the range of sickness that High Altitude Observatory Disease (HAOD) causes put my doctors in a land of misdiagnosis.”
― Steven Magee

“In general, fatigue is not as severe in depression as in ME/CFS. Joint and muscle pains, recurrent sore throats, tender lymph nodes, various cardiopulmonary symptoms (55), pressure headaches, prolonged post-exertional fatigue, chronic orthostatic intolerance, tachycardia, irritable bowel syndrome, bladder dysfunction, sinus and upper respiratory infections, new sensitivities to food, medications and chemicals, and atopy, new premenstrual syndrome, and sudden onset are commonly seen in ME/CFS, but not in depression. ME/CFS patients have a different immunological profile (56), and are more likely to have a down- regulation of the pituitary/adrenal axis (57). Anhedonia and self- reproach symptoms are not commonly seen in ME/CFS unless a concomitant depression is also present (58). The poor concentra- tion found in depression is not associated with a cluster of other cognitive impairments, as is common in ME/CFS. EEG brain mapping (59,60) and levels of low molecular weight RNase L (21,26) clearly distinguish ME/CFS from depression.”
― Bruce M. Carruthers

“Sleep disorders are commonly misdiagnosed as mental health disorders.”
― Steven Magee

“As hard to conceive as DID was, it was such a relief to learn that my blackouts weren't caused by alcohol. I wasn't some drunk struggling to get by in life. My apparent memory lapses were actually gaps in my knowledge and they had a medical reason: I genuinely wasn't there at the time.”
― Kim Noble, All of Me

“A wide variety of dissociative disorders including DID occur in the psychiatric population and may be misdiagnosed or underdiagnosed for a variety of reasons. Some psychiatrists believe these disorders are extremely rare and some believe that they do not exist. More research is needed, but these disorders may be more common than previously thought.”
― Julie P. Gentile

“Diagnosing dissociation does not make it happen, and denying it does not make it go away.”
― Bethany L. Brand

“There needs to be a nationwide awareness programme for all NHS staff, to educate them about dissociative disorders. Diagnoses need to be more obtainable within the NHS; people's lives should be placed ahead of funding restraints and bureaucratic red tape.”
― Joan Coleman

“If your doctor relies on blood and urine tests to diagnose and treat you, then you could be in serious trouble.”
― Steven Magee

“I think DID remains quite threatening to many people – this idea that people could have multiple personalities and switch back and forth.… I think unfortunately the media has created a stereotype, often a violent stereotype. So that’s part of what is frightening to people.

Also, there are a lot of people who just simply can’t believe it. How could this be!? It doesn’t make sense to them, and they miss it, even when it’s right in front of them. I certainly have seen DID patients switching away and the interviewer having no idea that this is going on or asks a vaguely-perceptive question like, “Did you just hear an hallucination?” Something like that. They recognise that something changed in the patient but they attribute it to more “conventional” symptoms like hallucinations.”
― Frank W Putnam

“The medical system is painfully broken.”
― Steven Magee

“The many prescription drugs made me sicker, not better.”
― Steven Magee, Hypoxia, Mental Illness & Chronic Fatigue

“So many people get sucked into the medical profession and end up on thousands of dollars of prescription medications every month that keeps them sickly!”
― Steven Magee

“The doctors could not fix me, so I had to do it myself!”
― Steven Magee

“Mental health treatment is really bad in the USA. Many people end up with a misdiagnosis and prescribed potent drugs that make them sicker.”
― Steven Magee

“The doctor was clueless!”
― Steven Magee