Take our Depression Test

Find a therapist near me

It's common in treatment situations that a person's assigned diagnosis doesn't seem like a good fit.

Psychiatrists may tolerate this ambiguity more readily than clients.

A good conversation between client and clinician can help resolve some of the tension in this moment.

Very often, major improvements can still occur even with diagnostic uncertainty.

In medicine, we try very hard to turn the symptoms that people present with into a diagnosis that can help guide optimal treatment. It’s a system that sounds great but, in reality, often falls short. Despite the approximately 300 different mental health diagnoses contained within the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of Mental Disorders, it is extremely common that the clinical picture a patient/client describes doesn’t fit neatly into any of them. Many of us train for years trying to learn and understand the details and nuances of all these conditions, only to find out that our patients never got the memo and come to us with a mishmash of symptoms that aren’t supposed to go together and span multiple different categories, or none at all.

Clinicians newly out of training are often frustrated and disheartened by this situation. How come nobody looks like the textbook case I learned about? It can feel like trying to put the proverbial square peg in a round hole. Or maybe it is best just to list all the diagnoses that sorta apply, leaving someone with five or more different labels to wear.

Patients and families similarly can be unsettled with a poorly fitting diagnosis. For some people, psychiatric diagnoses are soulless constructions that do more harm than good, but for others they........

© Psychology Today