Mistakenly Diagnosing Bipolar Disorder
Some 60 percent of adults with bipolar disorder are misdiagnosed as just being depressed. Dr. Charles Schaffer, a Sacramento psychiatrist specializing in bipolar disorder, says simply: “That’s the problem with psychiatry. Our diagnoses are not as valid or reliable as in other specialties”.
An article appearing originally in the Sacramento Bee and distributed via the APA reports on the problem of mistaking bipolar disorder for depression:
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Kent Mulkey got a divorce, moved to California and took antidepressants to deal with his depression.
Still, he couldn’t control his reckless behavior.
“When it all comes down to it, and the jig is up, I’ll kill myself,” is what he figured. “That was my default. I saw it as my way out.”
Fortunately, a solution came 10 years into Mulkey’s mental illness, he said, when his doctor determined he wasn’t suffering from depression alone, but had a milder form of bipolar disorder — also known as manic-depressive illness.
Mulkey is among the 35 percent of people whose accurate mental health diagnosis is delayed for a decade, and among the 60 percent of adults with bipolar disorder who are misdiagnosed as just being depressed.
Teasing apart psychiatric symptoms, finding the right medications and dosages to treat them — and getting the patient to comply with the regimen — are the fundamental challenges of psychiatry, the medical specialty that focuses on mental illness.
The rest of the article is available at APA PsycPort.
Other articles by Dr Greg Mulhauser, Managing Editor
This article was last reviewed by on Thursday, 2nd February 2006.
The URL of this page is:
http://counsellingresource.com/features/2006/02/02/bipolar-diagnosis/
3rd February 2006
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10th May 2007
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Wilma Brinton
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