How Often Are Mental Illnesses Misdiagnosed?
“How often are mental illnesses misdiagnosed?” is a common question we hear all the time. Watch the video below to learn more about the issues around misdiagnosing mental illness.
Learn More:
How Do You Prove Misdiagnosis?
Failure to Diagnose Mental Illness
Is Failure to Diagnose a Form of Medical Negligence?
Video Transcript
Timestamps
0:00 Intro
0:24 How Often Are Mental Illnesses Misdiagnosed? Diagnosis
0:54How Often Are Mental Illnesses Misdiagnosed? Mental Illnesses
1:53 Good Treatment
2:20 Failure To Diagnose
Clearly mental illness, it’s real torture for a lot of these patients and to the credit of our psychiatric and psychological professionals, they’re able to identify these illnesses.
0:24 How Often Are Mental Illnesses Misdiagnosed? Timely Diagnosis
Generally, now timely and move on to the task of getting the best treatment you need to get on the best treatment so that hopefully then, no one including the patient is damaged through the failure to diagnose timely.
The thing about mental illness in today’s world, and I think most psychiatrists would agree with me, is that we have probably the very best mental health pharmacopeia or drug collection that we’ve ever had to treat mental illness.
0:54 How Often Are Mental Illnesses Misdiagnosed? Mental Illnesses
Everything from schizophrenia to depression to bipolar disorder to personality disorders etc. There are criteria that are established that psychologists and psychiatrists learn in depth. They’re generally contained in very well recognized publications.
Psychologists and psychiatrists are trained to ask patients questions that allow them to differentiate one mental disorder from another. When they ask those questions, they take notes and they again put together the signs, the symptoms, again what the patient told them. The psychiatrist in that case then is able to look at the drugs he has available. They can then apply some personal experience as to what drugs they find work the best in their experience and then hopefully provide a drug that’s of benefit to the patient.
1:53 Misdiagnosing Mental Illness: Good Treatment
You need to identify the problem early, you need to see them in follow-up as you prescribe drug therapy, you need to figure out what works and what doesn’t work, and do it as quickly as possible.
2:20 Failure To Diagnose
If you have a patient who is diagnosed with one mental health entity and it’s an incorrect diagnosis, and that particular patient goes out, and due to a mental health problem either hurts themselves or hurts someone else, there’s significant liability that may attach both for the doctor and perhaps even to a victim who may be harmed by this patient who’s suffering from mental illness.