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Symptoms don't always mean diagnoses.

Trauma drives many symptoms that can lead to multiple diagnoses.

These symptoms can be thought of more as communications than as discrete conditions.

Because I specialize in treating complex patients, I often see people who come to me with four, five, sometimes six psychiatric diagnoses. Often these patients think that they lost the genetic lottery; how else could they be so unlucky as to have five or six separate biological brain disorders?

To help people understand why I think that they do not have a terrible genetic destiny, I talk about Whac-A-Mole, the arcade game where a player whacks a plastic mole as it pops out of a hole, only to have it disappear........

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