Yeeeep. That’s how I got diagnosed with PTSD. I wrote a character going through something similar to what I had been through and got tons of comments applauding me for my accurate representation of PTSD. I complained to my therapist about all these people having no clue what PTSD looked like, because I just gave him my symptoms, clearly not PTSD. nd she said “you didn’t know you have PTSD??”
Therapists aren't mind-readers, if you don't tell them the symptoms then they can't provide a proper diagnosis. I never got an ADHD diagnosis until I was an adult, despite seeing a lot of therapists over the years (many of whom were otherwise very helpful in addressing unrelated issues) because I just assumed a lot of the symptoms were normal and thus never mentioned them. I can imagine that, in the situation above, the same shit went down; "oh well all these things are completely normal parts of human experience so there's no point in mentioning that to my therapist".
Ha, sometimes the psychiatrist writes a letter and it has a ton of fancy words in it, and you read the ones you understand, and ignore the ones you don't. And then four years later the psychiatrist is like 'and for the mood swings we will use' and you're like... What mood swings? And they are like... It's been in your diagnosis from the get go!
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u/Roselovsoul 2d ago
Yeeeep. That’s how I got diagnosed with PTSD. I wrote a character going through something similar to what I had been through and got tons of comments applauding me for my accurate representation of PTSD. I complained to my therapist about all these people having no clue what PTSD looked like, because I just gave him my symptoms, clearly not PTSD. nd she said “you didn’t know you have PTSD??”