So go to the doctor and get an actual diagnosis?

Why don’t poor people just buy more money?

The way they diagnosed me at the hospital was literally by asking me what i thought i had. so fuck off with that shit. Self-diagnosis is actually better because you know yourself, ur mind, and ur body better than a doctor who doesn’t really give two shits about you.

My GP told me something really interesting at my yearly checkup back in November when i mentioned some concerns i had but prefaced them with “i don’t want you to think I’m self-dx’ing…”

wanna know what he said? Hold on to your butts…

He said “in my experience, most self-dx’s are either right, or are close to the mark. You’re the only one qualified to tell me what you are experiencing.”

I know. Shocking.

don’t even get me started on how bias, stigma, and bigotry on the part of medical professionals impacts diagnosis and treatment, which has been the center of both activism and academic study. I’m lucky to have the doctor i have, but most people don’t. So if you’re gonna act like “official” diagnoses are a unidirectional flow of knowledge, coming from an “expert” and bestowed upon those of us not “worthy” to be considered “experts” in our own experiences, at least acknowledge the power dynamics you are enacting when you do so. 

It’s so weird how there’s such a major disconnect between how people assume diagnosis works and how diagnoses actually works. Therapists, psychiatrists, psychologists, etc. are not diviners who can just mystically know what you have by blessed providence. They require an understanding of how you feel and what you’re going through because modern psychotherapy is about making sense of what you feel in comparison to generally known medical diagnoses and the practitioner’s (some aren’t even truly doctors yet yall who are so anti-self dx act like they are) own personal experience based on other patients they’ve had.

If you understand how you feel and you think you have a good idea the direction you need to be headed, you’ve already done a good amount of their job for them. It’s when you don’t know how to process what you’re experiencing or how to express it that the practitioner will then begin therapy to understand what you deal with in your day-to-day life and how you react to that. All of this information is brought into context with personal family medical history and, sometimes, regional medical issues as well as additional medical testing (if it’s really necessary), and then a more definite diagnosis can be made.

Most people who self-diagnose do so because they’ve come to understand how they feel and how they react, they’ve done the research into certain kinds of medical issues in lieu of visiting a potentially costly practitioner, and they’ve reached their own conclusion and they feel safe in self-diagnosing.

The hell that people raise about self-diagnosis on here should definitely be redirected into hellraising about the state of medicine in this country and how seriously financially debilitating it is trying to get your foot in the door for any treatment, much less reasonably priced treatment.