Is Self-Diagnosis Valid?

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Claim an emotional disorder - clinical depression; obsessive-compulsive disorder; bipolarism; post-traumatic stress disorder; unresolved issues of abandonment, grief, and anger - and as long as there is no clinical evidence to the contrary, you can milk the sympathies of those around you practically forever.

It's amazing how many such people behave just fine when they think no one is watching...

I think it would be ridiculous to claim a mental disorder just for sympathy. I never was officially diagnosed with PTSD but since I exibit all the symptoms and they make my life more hellish than it should be its safe to say I definatly have it. But I usually try to avoid sympathy like the plauge....because all it does is make me feel worthless because then people have to spend their time on me and my problems rather than things they would rather do. It is actaully insulting when people fake things for sympathy......in my opinion.

I correctly self-diagnosed myself with pure obsessional OCD at age 16, but that doesn't mean that I continued on with only a self-diagnosis. After researching OCD for about a year to be positively sure that this was what I was suffering from, I sought a professional diagnosis. Without a professional diagnosis, you are not able to get the medications and/or services you need to treat and manage the self-diagnosed disorder. I understand people who self-diagnose themselves with Asperger's not necessarily going on to get a professional diagnosis. After all, if the AS isn't interfering in their life enough for them to need medication, therapy, and/or disability income, there really is no point in spending a lot of money to get tested. But in most cases, if a condition is severe enough that you need to look up for yourself what's going on with your symptoms, it's a good idea to go get professional help. I feel the only exception to this is if you are unable to afford a consultation visit and/or meds due to low income or lack of insurance. Sadly, my best friend is in that situation and cannot afford to get the help she so desperately needs.

Oh there is something wrong, Fnord.

For example: A lady feigns an illness for hours to get attention in the E.R. and then they watch her behavior change when she thinks no one is watching. Eventually the Doc. made a deal with her when he found 'her game', and she agreed to the terms( he made it palatable, nice guy) and she finally left the hospital.

Now, all she wanted was "attention."

And this behavior doesn't arise just from an abusive background, experience. The "abusive background" is a catalyst in these "personality disorders." For example: There is evidence of a neurological change when a combined stress and certain genes transform, that give rise to the "splitting" you see in borderline personality disorders. It is biologically underpinned.

Please provide a link to the record of this incident - not that I don't believe you, but so that I get the actual facts of the matter from a source a little closer to the events.


Merriam-Webster's Dictionary defines Hypochondria as an "extreme depression of mind or spirits often centered on imaginary physical ailments".

It also defines Hypochondriasis as having a "morbid concern about one's health especially when accompanied by delusions of physical disease".

I've known people who self-diagnose, then sought "confirmation" from everyone except a medical expert. They always had an excuse as to why expert medical confirmation was inconvenient for them - too expensive, too far away, too busy, et cetera. Even when provided with a more-than-convenient opportunity (I'll pay, I'll drive, I'm the LPO and I took them off the duty roster for the day, et cetera), they still seem reluctant, if not downright fearful of getting the confirmation they need. More often than not, however, the expert medical diagnosis completely refuted the self-diagnosis, and the person lost all credibility for their claim.


The only way to confirm this is with (surprise!) an expert medical diagnosis, without which the individual may as well be just another attention-seeking whiner.

i do not think self diagnosis is valid.

i was diagnosed as autistic when i was less than one year old. my childhood and my adolescence and my adulthood i have spent oblivious to most of what is going on with people.

when i was a small child, it was more important and more serious that i was not adjusted socially (according to the world), because normal adults were involved in my progress through life and they found me to be profoundly deficient, yet still intelligent to a degree.

i left it up to them to decide what they thought i was, and i just was who i was without governance by any external expectation.


i can not imagine living for 20+ years from my birth without someone demanding for me to be analyzed.

in my case, as soon as i came into consciousness when i was a baby, there were worried people around me including doctors.

it was always known by my whole family and my doctors and the schools i went to that i had autism.

there was no need for me to "self diagnose".

Well, I can't provide that. It was on a health program, something ER related on satellite. (On Discovery?) The program featured general ER stuff.
I tried to search it on the web, thinking there could be link to youtube, but nothing. My account was all I could come up with.

I don't know if this woman was BPD, per say, and the program didn't imply this, but she clearly wasn't well in the head. She appeared as rational as the next Joe...... Well enough articulated, decently dressed, didn't appear to hear voices, and drove away in her car.

To me it wasn't noteworthy. I've seen something similar in several areas: I have an RN relative who worked the Psych. Unit as a nurse. Same stories. He once pointed out a customer, a woman in Service Merchandise, making a manipulative scene by crying and carrying on, playing the victim: "look what you're doing to me." She was trying to influence the counter help of what she wanted taken back. He said quietly, " She's BPD" I've seen it before." I knew it seemed "funny" or ill- neurotic, but I didn't know the terminology.
I've seen it elsewhere, I don't want to say where.

If you've been around it you'd know BPD

It is not valid because you had no need for self diagnoses? hmmm.

i did not say that self diagnoses are comprehensively invalid. i understand that there are some countries where mental health services cost a lot of money.

in australia, health care is almost imposed (free of charge).
when i was a baby, i did not seem normal to my parents or sisters, and they were worried, and they sought professional help that was provided free of charge.

the "system" saw that i may have to be accommodated differently than average people, and i quickly became a focus of investigation, but it was free of charge.

i may be harsh on people who apparently resort to a self diagnosis of asperger syndrome to explain their social inadequacies at the age of twenty something. i can not see how a person who has what i have can escape the scrutiny of authorities for more than a couple of years after birth.

but i allow that australia is a fortunate place for me to live, and if i lived in the USA, then i may have been thoroughly ignored by anyone who was not paid a lot of money to look at my situation.

if i lived in the USA, maybe i would be dead by now. who knows ?

the crux of it is that i do not automatically believe a person has AS if they have passed through their life for a long time before they wonder if they have AS because they read about it.

in my case, i was in the system catalog and receiving attention before i knew anything.

I think you have a good point, but I want to add that authorities can notice but not help.

By now I understand from what people told me reluctantly that about everybody noticed I am not normal. Nobody did anything about it.

They didn't want to bother with paperwork (to label me special needs), arguing with other authorities, arguing with my parents or they just plainly didn't like me enough to care about me. I think I'm not the only one like that.

in my case the authorities could see that i would cost them a lot of money if they did not take care to "accommodate" me.

it was insisted that i "be in the system", and much was paid by the government to make it "easy for me" to comply, but always i was not really touchable by anyone no matter how close they thought they came to understanding me.



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Ah that makes sense......lol I was just in kind of a bad mood yesterday because I felt like I was on the verge of a mental breakdown so I get a little defensive when I feel like that. But yeah I live in the U.S....and they do a terrible job of helping people here a lot of times. When I was around 7 I felt like I had to try as hard as I could to hide how different I was and that is what I did throughout public school how a child, outsmarts a bunch of adults with educations is beyond me....or maybe they just figured the quicker they passed me along (without questioning what the hell was wrong with me.) through the school system the quicker I would not be their responsibility.

Sorta'.
If you can honestly say you're being totally objective, yes.
But doctors also make mistakes, so I wouldn't trust them all the time, either.

I chose other. Let me explain.

Really, a diagnosis is just a professional opinion. There are no completely objective tests, so it's a matter of relative validity, not absolute validity. A professional diagnosis would generally carry more weight than a self-diagnosis, for obvious reasons.

However, while some cases may resemble ADHD, schizoid, or something else, many cases are distinct. This doesn't mean another person has to acknowledge the self-diagnosis as valid, but the person in question shouldn't have to wait for an official diagnosis before getting on with his or her life.

That said, you had better have a damn good reason for believing you're enough of an expert. Just reading the diagnostic criteria isn't enough.

Fnord,
So what you are saying is, that even though you are not a trained, licensed medical professional, you can refute someone's claim of a disorder? I wish I had your powerful, psychic abilities. Is that part of AS that I don't have, seeing as I have not yet received an official diagnosis? Also, the last I checked, most of humankind doesn't dole out sympathy for emotional / neurological disorders-- they stigmatize and ridicule them. Your statement reminds me of the insulting nonsense I had to listen to from one "trained, licensed medical professional" who claimed that I was trying to manipulate him into an AS diagnosis. It's such a sexy, fashionable disorder, after all. Oh, but wait...I can't have AS; I can use sarcasm!

I chose other. I've had doctors who refused to give me a DX wanting me to wait for lab results. What I found out was I was right (I refused to leave the doc's office without meds) & it was confirmed by the lab results 2 weeks later. Had I waited for medication for 2 whole weeks, I probably would have ended up in an emergency room. As it was, I went to the doctor because of severe pain. I've had other doctors who were wrong too. Doctors are people too, sometimes they're right & other times they're wrong. I may not have a degree in medicine, but I do know when there's something that is off with me.

Right now every shrink I've seen about AS has told me I don't have it. However, I have a boatload of symptoms which point direct to AS. Soooo, I may not have an official DX for it, but I'm pretty damned sure that's my main issue right now.