We all feel down and go through stressors from time to time, which is a normal part of life. When we feel the need to understand it from the point of view of a professional by ourselves, it becomes dangerous.
Life may hit us to rock bottom so we feel we may be having a mental health condition.
Due to the prevailing lack of awareness surrounding mental health and what qualifies as a diagnosis we open the internet to try to fix it ourselves. The internet, filled with many unqualified professionals leads them to believe they have certain conditions when they do not.
As a Licensed Clinical psychologist who has been trained and qualified to provide diagnosis for mental health conditions, I have noticed a trend in my practice where people reach out to me with a diagnosis in mind.
They themselves or people around them make them believe they have a certain diagnosis. This comes from a place where there is a need to understand the anguish and difficulties they are struggling with.
The difficult situation that I have started to face is when the client has so firmly believed that they have a diagnosis they find it hard to believe my professional point of view.
When it comes to mental health conditions and their diagnosis, many conditions have very similar presentations and they have very minute differences that only trained professionals can distinguish. There are many steps to making a diagnosis and sometimes it requires extensive research, testing, and sometimes supervision.
Labelling ourselves with a condition can be harmful to our health, as we might get scared about how to go about it. Only psychologists with a master’s degree and above are qualified mental health professionals.
Clinical psychologists are licensed to provide diagnostic reports, and Psychiatrists are medical experts who can diagnose and prescribe medications. Keeping these in mind, let us all take a step to stop stressing ourselves out with self-diagnosing.
Akshaya