What might a diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder really mean?
Look at the example of Bipolar Disorder. A wide range of opinions exist among psychiatrists as to which groups of symptoms should trigger this diagnosis. Some psychiatrists are now accused of believing that essentially everyone with a mood disorder is “Bipolar”. They’ll argue that if the requisite manic symptoms don’t appear to have been present that must be because the person didn’t remember or interpret a period of unusually good mood as evidence of a manic episode. Some shrinks will even claim that if a person with depression hasn’t had a manic episode it’s only a matter of time until they do. So they diagnose Bipolar Disorder based on assumptions about symptoms that they think the person will have in the future. The implications of this kind of confusion are considerable. These days if one were to take a representative sample of public sector patients who have been diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder it will become clear that a wide variety of problems have lead to the application of t
