Many of us crazies, as well as the professionals who care for us, are aware that most of us do not simply fit into one category. For example, some of us are bipolar with a hint of ADD, have borderline personality disorder with depressive and psychotic features, or have a schizoaffective disorder with PTSD and addiction mixed in. Humans and their minds are both extremely complicated.
It\'s Not Your Depression If I\'m Depressed
Furthermore, my depression is different from your depression. In fact, so much so that continuing to use the same word would be absurd. Compared to you, I sleep for 15 hours every day. My profession is lucrative, but I don\'t have any relatives or friends. You participate in online support groups for ten hours a day yet have neither. While you aim to murder yourself once a week, I consider it every day. I always weep, but you never do. Are we similar? Am I depressed more or less than you are?
And when you compare personality disorders, bipolar, ADD, PTSD, and comorbid diseases like addiction, things become even more challenging. And yet, somehow, we\'re expected to sort it all out, give it a name, and treat it accordingly. That is quite difficult. If you wish to recover from spravto treatment-resistant depression, think about going to a clinic.
Mental Illness Is Not a Box You Can Close
Therefore, some medical professionals prefer to place patients on continuums rather than in boxes. You would develop into a multi-dimensional individual with likely severity ratings. As a result, I may be 80% bipolar with a severity rating of 7/10, 10% anxious with a rating of 3/10, and 10% with PTSD with a rating of 2/10.
And you may see that continuums truly do fit more people than boxes do if you are familiar with people who suffer from mental illnesses and are knowledgeable about disorders. Naturally self-contained, boxes.
However, there are several issues with this. Really, there are too many to count. First off, how would you gauge a person\'s level of depression? What about schizophrenia? What about bipolar? There are various scales that have been created for this, but no standard exists because no scale has been shown to be 100 percent accurate. The scales we do have are more useful for tracking improvement or decline over time than they are for calculating an exact score that reflects how much of something you are.
Condition Severity Mental
and seriousness. Seriousness is a matter of opinion. Naturally, it is serious if I am unable to work due to a disorder, but it can also be serious to only have a job in your life. Doctors believe that planning your suicide is worse than thinking about it, but is it really severe if all you do all day is think about dying? Is it severe or not if you cut yourself but don\'t actually get hurt seriously?
It is personal. The term "severe" may not mean the same thing to you and me. Moreover, it probably varies from doctor to doctor, making it challenging to establish a measurement.
Psychological Definition
But even if we could quantify the extent and severity of your sickness and give you a magic number that stood in for all of that, what good would that do? The available treatments are unaffected by it. The medications, treatments, electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), and vagus nerve stimulator (VNS) remain unchanged.
All that is left is. What\'s the sense of being so quantitatively exact when a doctor may currently give any drug for any disorder? Doctors will attempt lithium, mood stabilizers, and antipsychotics regardless of whether you are 100% bipolar or 75% with some PTSD. It doesn\'t matter at all.
At this point, I just don\'t see a way around it, but I admire a system that is trying to recognize that we\'re all different and that through traditional diagnosis we almost always get it somewhat wrong. Mental health disease cannot be quantified like a burn, where the depth and percentage of afflicted skin may be determined. Simply put, it\'s not that easy. And perhaps in the future, when we have more information, we\'ll be able to quantify brain disorders, but sadly, we aren\'t there yet.