“I read some Psychiatry research articles at Uni and thought it was a good idea to test them out.”
While I was at university, I was finding out why I was so different in comparison to my peers. I read plenty of Psychiatry research articles and thought it was a good idea to test the validity of the findings. So, what I did was pretended to display some symptoms of the diagnoses that I wanted to test out; 1. Schizophrenia, 2. Borderline Personality Disorder. To determine if the Psychiatrist was able to be accurate with the differential diagnosis.
The articles I read were on the following topics: 1. The accuracy of diagnosis based on the years of experience that the Psychiatrists has, 2. How easy it is for patients to fake their Psychiatry examinations and Psychological tests, 3.The accuracy of differential diagnosis based on the years of experience of the Psychiatrist, 4. Prejudices, biases, stigmatization and if they effect the quality of healthcare for the patient — waiting time at the emergency department, quality of health care services, taking the patient seriously i.e. quality of soft skills, quality of follow up care, equal opportunities even amidst other mental health consumers.
I found out, that even when you are also a healthcare professional + mental health consumer, it doesn’t matter. Most often than not, some of these professionals still treat you just like any Mental Health consumer whom walks through those doors of the emergency department, with the diagnoses blaring in the imaginary loudspeakers. The worst diagnoses to have are indeed schizophrenia and borderline personality disorder. Because schizophrenia means you are hallucinating that pain or lump in your abdominal cavity and when you have borderline personality disorder, you are simply being dramatic i.e. drama queen. And when you have something like these on your medical charts, whispering the word “retard” in your ears by the nurse whom just took your bloods in the middle of the night, tops it all off.
Ever catch the healthcare professional roll their eyes when they look at your chart and make throughout their shift, are persistent with the non-obscure eye rolling, like they really just want you to know that you are probably over reacting and “oh my god, she is so dramatic.” — rolls eyes.
Perhaps you can also attempt at finding those articles, I remember really clearly that the number of people die or went into a code blue situation was significant enough for me to want to replicate the experiment to determine if it was really a dire concern! Guys! Stop with the prejudices why don’t you? Please? Pretty please?
But do you know what, I learned that not everybody is psychologically ready to perform such experiments. Because after awhile of pretending, there’s a space in time that you forget you are healthy and you start to fall into a rabbit hole for a while. Until you have come to the insight and awareness, then you quickly grab hold of the proverbial long ropey hair of Repunzel. Help me…
Also, disclaimer: Not everybody is this nasty, I just happened to have been surrounded by the nasty ones. I have met beautiful health care professionals who will pick you up, dust you off and cheer you on.