My first-hand experience of the healthcare system in the USA leads me to conclude we don’t have good data on pathological anxiety levels. Psychiatry is over-incentivized to positively diagnose.
You can get diagnosed with ‘anxiety’ when you’ve been in a hard circumstance for a while, since it’s simply a self-reporting questionnaire on levels of concern. That’s not a way to determine pathology - how do they tell when it’s appropriate behavior, eg when you’re actually in a dangerous situation.
This economy, since the financial crisis, has had weak employment (when you factor in not-in-workforce trends over the last 50 years), being under-employed for a long time is a threat to life. You can be in a location or situation where you’re blind to a loss of economic opportunity because there is so much misinformation. Anxiety is not maladaptive then.
This happened to me, and when my situation finally began to improve after a change in direction, my anxiety went down. Before I made that change, I found anti-anxiety meds put me in a dysfunctional ‘happy’ state, that made it harder to course correct or care about my reality. So I quickly stopped taking them last year, shortly after receiving them. And yet a diagnosis was made then, and looking at my medical report, this so called disease remains on my medical record. Ridiculous. All that self-reporting showed was normal human behavior.
Luckily, at the worst time, I also hedged by seeing separately a psychologist who helped me understand through a series of interviews that all my behavior was appropriate to my situation.
I went to a psychiatrist to be evaluated for ADHD. He diagnosed me with anxiety, saying that being anxious made it hard for me to focus.
Uh.
I went to another doc who diagnosed me with and started treating me for ADHD. Boom. Anxiety gone. Turns out I was just super anxious about having a hard time working on the un-shiny things I needed to be working on.
I'd say anxiety is a symptom of mental health problem like having a cough -- the underlying cause can be very different in people.
Since I was little I suffered from terrible schizotypal anxiety which somehow cleared up completely in middle age [1] I never got along with a person I knew who had panic disorder despite trying hard: some if it is that my anxiety makes me move towards dangerous things (I've been seen going into a building when the fire alarm was on) and his anxiety makes him want to banish every possible source of anxiety from his life but the more he does that the more fragile it gets.
[1] I don't know if it was Gabapentin, or a few years of attempting business developer, or meeting my "evil twin" or discovering my schizotypy or just getting old enough that I don't give a fuck.
It’s different for everyone, of course. In my case, it was almost entirely about me being stressed out that it was impossible to get starting on big, looming projects before they became emergencies. “If I don’t do this, I’ll probably get fired. I know I have to do this. Why can’t I just do this?” is quite anxiety producing.
Dude, that's wild. I can't imagine what you could do to get infected with so many different organisms. Are you sure there isn't some underlying unifying reason, like rare genetic disease that makes you more prone to infections or something?
It’s all opportunistic infections, compounding on each other’s impact on the total capacity of an immune system.
Mold exposure drives immune dysfunction (including gut dysbiosis, and weakness of important barrier-type tissues) that allow these common infections to really thrive.
The environment described above leads to impaired cognitive function, and, if the glymphatic impact (detox inefficiency) is left unaddressed long enough, stuff like Alzheimer’s, dementia, more.
What you believe to be rare, reading my case, is quite common - but simply yet to be fully understood.
Slowly the lonely anecdata of hidden, missed chronic illness is being joined by data, and scientific fact:
Anecdotally I see a high correlation between taking antianxiety meds and having health issues that require doctoring. Plus I see a lot of abnormal self-diagnosis of ADHD going on in my social circles.
Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that I went through the normal channels and saw a doctor who did the full standard-of-care evaluation and assessment as part of the diagnostic process.
The only slightly unusual thing I did was get a second opinion from a qualified, in-network physician instead of taking the first result at face value.
It makes me uneasy how people with ADHD shopped around until they got a diagnosis like this. Surely you let the doctor tell YOU whats wrong with you, rather than you tell the doctor?
No way, no how. It’s called advocating for yourself, in the parlance of our times, and it’s not remotely limited to just this one aspect. Doctors are extremely busy and don’t have the time to go Dr. House on your specific case. If you go in with symptoms A, B, and C, and they stop listening at A and diagnose you with something that causes A, insist that they consider B and C, too.
Also, a good doctor won’t take issue with this, so long as you don’t insist that your 5 minutes on WebMD is right and they’re wrong.
Analogy: If someone at work says they can’t log in, and also that their already logged in password queries don’t work, it could mean that the login service is down and the database is down. It could also mean that AWS is down, and rebooting those other services isn’t going to fix the common root cause.
There are a lot of bad doctors out there. Like, dangerously bad.
If you think a doctor is wrong, they very well might be, particularly if you have already done your homework. This is not the old days, where medical knowledge is exclusively available to doctors. In fact, it is a huge risk to go in unprepared and ignorant of the possibilities, because misdiagnoses are not uncommon if critical symptoms get overlooked due to the patient not presenting them.
Ask yourself not how many doctors graduated with honors. Ask yourself how many barely graduated after cheating their way through the program and are now faking their way through life.
> Ask yourself how many barely graduated after cheating their way through the program and are now faking their way through life.
id probably still have to take his word over yours. and didnt these same doctors discover ADHD in the first place? at once theyre reliable and "dangerously bad"
Many cases of ADHD are allergic reactions. When I get a dose of something I'm allergic to (molds, perfumes...) I'll end up being scatter-brained for the day.
My child was the same way due to a wheat allergy (U.S. wheat is heavier than European wheat, and the flour comes out differently. It's actually tougher to digest for many).
As for letting the doctor tell you... The last few decades, I find I've been making the diagnosis first. Chronic fatigue, adult chicken pox, whooping cough... In each case, the medical history I gave was a reasonable path for ordering tests to get the correct diagnosis, but in each case the doctors missed it.
The whooping cough one was particularly annoying. I had traveled to Amsterdam, which had an outbreak a couple of years ago. I told the doctors this, and they still diagnosed me as having an ordinary sinus infection and gave me the wrong antibiotics. My wife looked up the medical alerts in Amsterdam, I messaged the doctor asking for the correct antibiotics (just in time).
Doctors in the U.S. follow protocols. When they don't they have to file extra paperwork. The entire system is designed to punish deviation from protocol, and the protocols don't get adjusted based on evidence or circumstance. They're handed down from a committee that the insurance companies take as law. Insurance companies in particular are geared to denying payment for deviation from protocol without prior approval. So doctors adjust their behavior to go with the flow... unless you find a great doctor, who knows better.
These days, you really do need to take your health in your own hands. Doctors become a path to confirmation and treatment, at least on the illness side of things. Injury tends to be a little more cut-and-dried, but even there you have to find the right experts. For example for sports injuries, you likely want doctors that see many patients that play that particular sport because they have experience with how things can go wrong.
Sorry for the rant. I've just seen the need for shopping a lot more in recent years.
If the medical system was infallible, you'd have a solid point. In practice, medical professionals operate within their own biases, rather than being purely objective observers of your symptoms
I tried Focalin, and ended up on plain Adderall. For me, they didn’t create any anxiety at all, or any other noticeable side effects or adverse reactions. I count myself very lucky.
Of course! And everyone is different. In my specific case, only one was true. Treating the root cause fixed all the related symptoms. Others will have different experiences.
It probably wasn't even the first bite. Most victims of dog bites are friends of a biting dog's owner, with implicit (and sometimes explicit) pressure not to report. I've met people whose dogs have bit as many as seven people without having a formal bite record.
I was mauled by a rabbit, not a dog (I love dogs!!!).
But in theory it is impossible to report rabbit attack. Police will refuse to write a protocol, and give you an report! If you insist, they insert weasel words like "non aggressive rabbit was provoked", making any further claims hard to prove.
I would recommend anyone whose neighbors have aggressive rabbits, to install cameras, keep all records several years back.
And report every incident! And also check your report was actually kept, and put on record a few weeks later!
Makes everything much easier in a longer-term, if your family members ends in hospital!!
I can only understand this if they were incapcitated, unconscious... I mean just kick it off, it weighs a few ounces. How does a rabbit do enough damage to require amputation of the effing leg!?! Think how small a rabbits mouth is, they dont each meat so it would take them a long time to chow down on your leg. Theyre weaker than a cat, unless its one of those massive hares, and have you ever heard a cat mauling someones leg off? I need to see either the size of this rabbit, or the size of this person.
I guess experience depends. If positive diagnosis, is attached to some sort of compensations.
If psychiatry can sell you cheep medicine for a huge profit, they will overdisgnose.
If employer, institute, state, or university would have to pay compensations, they will under diagnose.
About 20% of US population went through horrible sexual abuse (documented fact). I would not discount the amount of people who have anxiety and PTSD from past events.
You can get diagnosed with ‘anxiety’ when you’ve been in a hard circumstance for a while, since it’s simply a self-reporting questionnaire on levels of concern. That’s not a way to determine pathology - how do they tell when it’s appropriate behavior, eg when you’re actually in a dangerous situation.
This economy, since the financial crisis, has had weak employment (when you factor in not-in-workforce trends over the last 50 years), being under-employed for a long time is a threat to life. You can be in a location or situation where you’re blind to a loss of economic opportunity because there is so much misinformation. Anxiety is not maladaptive then.
This happened to me, and when my situation finally began to improve after a change in direction, my anxiety went down. Before I made that change, I found anti-anxiety meds put me in a dysfunctional ‘happy’ state, that made it harder to course correct or care about my reality. So I quickly stopped taking them last year, shortly after receiving them. And yet a diagnosis was made then, and looking at my medical report, this so called disease remains on my medical record. Ridiculous. All that self-reporting showed was normal human behavior.
Luckily, at the worst time, I also hedged by seeing separately a psychologist who helped me understand through a series of interviews that all my behavior was appropriate to my situation.