There are times when life, and all its aspects, just don’t quite fit into place. You can feel that this feeling stems from within you – your heart sinking for no reason, a worry that follows you throughout your day like a stalker, or a low mood that refuses to change no matter what. You talk to a doctor about it, try what they suggest, and, in all likelihood, life just goes on.
Until, years into this cycle, you finally come across an answer, one that makes everything click into place. You almost wonder why you, or nobody else helping you, ever thought of it, and why you carried this baggage for all these years. This is what mental health conditions are sometimes like, and there are more people out there than you can imagine who experience this. But why does it keep happening, and why are mental health conditions so difficult to identify? Keeping these questions in mind, let’s take a look at how these conditions are diagnosed and what the reasons are for this recurrence.
Mental Health Conditions Are Like a Jigsaw With Many Overlapping Pieces
As you would have already known, mental health conditions are not something that a doctor can confirm the existence of using some diagnostic tool. It’s not like an actual physical condition, where an X-ray or blood test can probably tell you exactly what you’re experiencing and why. As such, the diagnosis of such intangible problems can only begin with you trying to describe it across several conversations. You need to tell your doctor what you feel, how long you’ve been feeling it, and how much it interferes with your everyday life.
The somewhat annoying part about this is that what you describe here – your symptoms – can actually point to many different conditions. Poor sleep, low energy, irritability, withdrawal, and persistent low mood are things that depression, anxiety, and trauma all share in common with one another. What makes things more complicated are the smaller overlaps. If you’ve faced difficulties in concentrating, feeling restless all the time, and experiencing a constant feeling of being overwhelmed, your first guess would probably be ADHD. While it could be possible, you might also be experiencing a bout with anxiety instead.
It’s also quite common for people to have two conditions at once. Anxiety coupled with depression, for example. Both may produce almost similar symptoms, and in most cases the louder one – anxiety – will receive care and attention first, while depression has to wait for its turn. Age is another problematic factor for doctors to work with. A moody teenager may very well be just going through adolescence, but it becomes dangerous when persistent mood changes are brushed off as a phase.
Your Symptoms Can Also Change With Time
BPD, or bipolar disorder, is a classic example of your symptoms changing with time. Most people struggling with this condition seek help during the low period, when life feels difficult and overwhelming. But they may also not seek help during the highs, which can make the lows feel temporary. When you’re energetic and productive after a long period of difficulty, BPD won’t even be something that comes to your mind. Plus, even if you do make an appointment during a low period, the doctor will naturally lean more towards depression first. The full pattern can emerge only once someone takes a look at you for many years.
Just take a look at the numbers for a second. According to a meta-analysis that pooled data from 27 studies, it took 5.8 years for more than 9000 people to get proper management for bipolar disorder – almost six years from the first symptom to actual identification of the condition. The uglier side of all of this is that people with such conditions may get prescribed antidepressants based on their symptoms. Taking such impactful medications for such a long time can potentially lead to even more destabilisation of symptoms in people with BPD or any other conditions.
Your Mental Health May Not Be at Blame Here
There are times when whatever people experience and chalk up to mental health problems may not be psychiatric at all. Given how our brain and the rest of our body are constantly in touch with one another, any physical or hormonal problem can also dress and show up as a mental health condition. Take an underactive thyroid, or hypothyroidism, as an example. It is a condition that is known to bring with it fatigue, low mood, poor concentration, and anxiety. The symptoms listed are practically a perfect impression of what depression does to our body too. Vitamin deficiencies, sleep disorders, other hormonal changes, and certain medications can play similar illusions on us, hence why physical checks should always be considered during a psychiatric condition’s diagnosis.
People Just Aren’t Very Good at Communicating Mental Health Troubles
This may not apply to you specifically, but it’s a major piece of the puzzle for a lot of people. Describing what you feel at any point can be hard, especially if nobody ever gave you the vocabulary and tools to do so. In a lot of households, for instance, emotions are often the last thing that comes up in discussions and mental health struggles are seen as a weakness of sorts.
What ends up happening is that you describe your problems in very vague terms – a simple “I’m very stressed right now” isn’t going to help your doctor understand what’s going on, unfortunately. Much of this stems from a fear of judgement, as many people attach a heavy stigma to mental wellbeing – often going as far as to only think in extreme binaries. You’re either doing well, or you need to be admitted into a mental hospital for your own safety.
Forget personal spaces and loved ones. Even our society’s culture has only caught up in the last few years. Before then, mental distress was often only expressed through physical symptoms. People would say that they are experiencing frequent headaches, insomnia, stomach trouble, and constant exhaustion, without describing their emotional health or other circumstances in their lives. Again, if you only tell your doctor about physical symptoms, they’ll understandably look for physical causes first, likely prescribing medication for physical symptoms afterwards.
The bigger issue is what all of this does to you, individually. Help is even sought late or only once things reach a point of complete crisis. You become an expert at masking your problems, deluding yourself into thinking you’re fine while barely coping as stealthily as possible. None of this helps your doctor when you actually talk to them, and none of it helps you manage your everyday life.
Knowing When a Fresh Pair of Eyes Might Help
Now, if you’ve already been in the system for a while and things haven’t quite worked out, it may be time for a second opinion. There are going to be some super obvious signs that you need to switch things up immediately. Your treatment course isn’t helping you like you thought it would. The final diagnosis from your doctor isn’t exactly a match with what you feel. Or it feels like your whole history wasn’t accounted for. Things like that warrant changing doctors, preferably to a specialist, as they are specifically trained to tell similar conditions apart.
Because of this, many people start looking for a good private psychiatrist in London. It not only helps you sidestep the NHS referral process, but also lets you get an appointment much faster and start your diagnosis from scratch. That said, if you do go down this route, always ensure that you arrive prepared with all the required information. Note your symptoms, when they started, whether they have changed since your last appointment, what makes them better or worse, and everything else in between.
Be Gentle With Yourself
At the end of the day, please remember that a long wait for an answer doesn’t mean anything bad about you as a person; it is not a failure on your part; it doesn’t mean you imagined things before; and it absolutely doesn’t put help out of reach. A correct diagnosis, no matter how long it takes to come, is always the start of a next, better chapter in your treatment. So just be patient with yourself and keep going at whatever pace feels good to you. Better days are far more reachable than they might seem right now.
