I diagnosed myself years before actually getting a diagnosis from a reliable source. The diagnosis they gave me was the same one I had given myself.
I can understand your feeling somewhat bewildered by the change in diagnosis. The new diagnosis is still pretty close to what you were diagnosed with before, isn’t it?
Diagnosis is an art. It’s not something an ill person should enter into lightly. Today, given the climate of treatment for the mentally ill, it is something all of us do just to check on the doctors’ negligence or indifference. They’re overworked and make mistakes that we feel we have a need or right to correct.
A diagnosis gives you a place to start.
This disease is too complicated. What`s important is to be on the right medications.
I think it’s human nature to want to belong to a group even if it is a mental illness category. That having been said appropriate and timely support and treatment for symptoms and their effects is more important than an actual diagnosis.
Indeed being given a diagnosis may restrict the support and treatment you get for your full range of symptoms, especially symptoms that are seen as secondary/irrelevent in terms of your primary/sole diagnosis.
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I completely understand. Sometimes I go through the same thing myself. I feel like if I’m not hallucinating, going through some sort of bipolar cycle, or having a delusion I’m not really sick. I feel like I’m an imposter who is trying to chum up to people by saying ‘oh poor me, I’m sick I can’t do this (or that)’. I often feel like you have to be just so sick to qualify under the magical ‘this is a legitimate concern/issue’ umbrella. Like a ‘you have to be this tall to ride’. I go out of my way to pretend to not be sick and I try to do things that I’m too sick to do because I feel like I’m not good enough for my problems to be real.
You are sick. You could be called sz, sza, bipolar with sz features, a talking panda, it doesn’t matter. None of that negates what you’ve gone through in your life. All the diagnostic changes in the world are going to change the nights of paranioa, the desperate calls to the doctor because you are just unable to cope anymore, none of it is going to change the fact that you legitimately are ill and you have a legitimate problem.
If someone tries to pull a ‘sicker than thou’ on you tell them you’ll sic your squirrel army on them.
I regularly go through the “I’m not ill I’m just socially dysfunctional” type thinking. Especially since I have moved into the chronically, not acutely,ill category.
I consider getting a diagnosis pretty important. While getting diagnosed with something can make me feel like I’m crazy in some form at times, it also brings me relief because now I can finally understand what I’m going through and what to call it. I don’t believe I have gotten any diagnosis changes in the past, but diagnoses can be changed at times as we go through life. Just because your diagnosis got changed doesn’t mean that your struggle is/wasn’t real with your illness.