Professional Incompetence: "Trendy" Diagnoses in the Health Industry

One professional summed it up: if they don't know what's wrong with a person, they choose the most popular diagnosis.
Unfortunately, the accuracy of this remark concludes that professional incompetence is not only frightening, but dangerous-- far too many patients, when misdiagnosed, do not receive the help they need and deserve.

One factor in this problem is that geography plays a large role. Many areas, especially those which are overcrowded, rely on "pat diagnoses" rather than taking the time to investigate what the true problem is. It's scary, but the fact is when presented with many more patients than time, it is far too convenient, far too quick and easy, to simply state that the person has whatever condition is most "popular." What is equally appalling is that the professionals in many areas simply lack the up-to-date information needed to properly assess conditions.

One extreme but true horror story involved a young man who sought help through an out-patient psychiatric clinic; he expected counseling, and he also informed the intake advisor that he was a "recovering drug addict." However... after some brief questions about his background, which the counselor accurately assessed as delusions, he was deemed "schizophrenic," and presented with his first prescription. The "help" thereafter was limited to what that particular agency called "20-minute med. checks"-- short visits with one of the resident psychiatrists, who did nothing and asked nothing, but merely wrote more and more prescriptions-- a total of eight medications in a one-month period.

The first part of the problem was for the person's Healthcare Proxy to attempt to communicate that he had Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder-- the intake advisor's response: "We don't believe in that sort of thing."
The second problem: when a "clean" (drug-free) addict is in the position of putting drugs into his system, if they are not for their proper, legitimate purpose, it "releases his addiction" to its active state all over again.

In another geographical area, it was stunning to hear how many people have been diagnosed as "bipolar." It is odd enough that such a large percentage of the population have mental illnesses in general, but this specific diagnosis is of epidemic proportions. Meaning: it is not likely. One may be tempted to wonder if these pill-pushing professionals are aligned with the pharmaceutical companies that manufacture the drugs they hand out so freely.

Trendy? Outrageous? One middle-aged male stated that he knows "at least eight people" in the relatively-small city where he lives, who have "Multiple Personality Disorder"!

Another equally frightening and equally dangerous trend is, as the saying goes, "a little knowledge is a bad thing." Individuals who have absolutely no training whatsoever pick up a textbook, a magazine, or the WorldWideWeb, and start tossing around words like 'dissociating' and 'triggering,' believing that from reading a book or observing people's habits they have adequate knowledge to diagnose themselves and others.

For the sake of clarity, the only truly important difference between a high school dropout with a book who claims to be an expert, and the outrageous degree of nonprofessionalism exhibited by many who have earned their credentials, is that the latter is educated and intelligent enough to know better.