Self-Diagnosis, how does it hold up to professional opinion? -- LiveWire Teen Forums

Quote: from lostwitness at 2:09 pm on Nov. 20, 2008

Quote: from prisoner of hss at 8:38 am on Nov. 20, 2008

I agree. Labels help though when there is a serious syndrome of symptoms. The label helps the patient to better understand his condition, and to learn how to cope and treat it.
When it's just a set of emotional problems, I don't see why. It's much more honest to just understand the cause. It doesn't matter how bad it is.

Many people like you are worse off with labels, more severe cases where the patient is disabled by their emotional instability need a label, and an explanation to be able to get better.

That's only because they receive shitty support so they cling to some shitty label to feel better about themselves. And by the way, my problems were 'very severe'. I was 'disabled' by them according to many. The 'labels' appeared to "help" and might make one feel better superficially, but it doesn't do anything in the long run. I felt all better understood and more aware after getting some silly labels for awhile, but it's really very self defeating.
I don't want to get into a debate here, but minimizing ANYONE to some stupid label seems like the wrong thing to do, and the same thing applies to people with 'severe' problems; don't assume that my problems weren't very very severe just because I got over them.

DO you mind sharing what you were labeled with and how you overcame it in the end. I agree I don't want to debate this either. I'm just curious of your history.

I believe I was labeled with major depression/clinical depression and bi-polar disorder. I've also been labeled ADHD a few times. Anyhow, for awhile I bought into the genetic and biological stuff, and it was certainly a useful placenta, but this almost became a 'part of me', in that I was 'depression', not someone who was suffering from severe emotional problems. That's what labels do. It becomes a part of you if you're emotionally fucked up. Emotionally fucked up people won't just 'understand it', it will become a part of them because they need something to cling to out of desperation.

I was always curious though, so I started to look into this, and realized that these claims were more and more tenuous as time went on, and this spurred a lot of doubts. It also caused a ton of emotional trouble for me, because now I was forced to figure myself out. But in the long run this really paid off, though not immediately. For awhile I had figured myself out but had no idea how to get out of my rut, and this went on until a bunch of things made me incredibly cynical and shifted the blame from inside to outside.

It was a lot of things, but I can name a few of the things that opened the floodgates;

1) My parents utter lack of empathy for me expressing that I didn't want to be in there

2) My friend getting me thrown in there doing it to be "caring" after acting callous and insensitive to me for months before, then refusing to admit he did wrong

3) Realizing that people were socially conditioned to act in these stupid ways

4) Some of the crap in there really made me realize how FUCKED UP the system, and much of society was. I acknowledged it generally already, but this really brought it into the spotlight.

There was a lot, lot more, I'm just giving some examples of what started it. I'm pretty sure I could have come to that without that event specifically if I had looked in the right places, which probably would have happened eventually. The gradual increase in cynicism eventually got rid of my self defeating mindset and gave me a lot of confidence I didn't before.

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