Diagnosis Quotes

“I told Augustus the broad outline of my miracle: diagnosed with Stage IV thyroid cancer when I was thirteen. (I didn’t tell him that the diagnosis came three months after I got my first period. Like: Congratulations! You’re a woman. Now die.)”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“I couldn’t trust my own emotions. Which emotional reactions were justified, if any? And which ones were tainted by the mental illness of BPD? I found myself fiercely guarding and limiting my emotional reactions, chastising myself for possible distortions and motivations. People who had known me years ago would barely recognize me now. I had become quiet and withdrawn in social settings, no longer the life of the party. After all, how could I know if my boisterous humor were spontaneous or just a borderline desire to be the center of attention? I could no longer trust any of my heart felt beliefs and opinions on politics, religion, or life. The debate queen had withered. I found myself looking at every single side of an issue unable to come to any conclusions for fear they might be tainted. My lifelong ability to be assertive had turned into a constant state of passivity.”
― Rachel Reiland, Get Me Out of Here: My Recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder

“Calling it lunacy makes it easier to explain away the things we don't understand.”
― Megan Chance, The Spiritualist

“Everyone may agree upon the diagnosis, but not everyone may consent to the therapy. Indeed, for healing, things have to be sacrificed at times and separation or loss might always be heartbreak and leave scars of remorse or regret. (“Sorrow”)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“THE MAXIMS OF MEDICINE

Before you examine the body of a patient,
Be patient to learn his story.
For once you learn his story,
You will also come to know
His body.
Before you diagnose any sickness,
Make sure there is no sickness in the mind or heart.
For the emotions in a man’s moon or sun,
Can point to the sickness in
Any one of his other parts.
Before you treat a man with a condition,
Know that not all cures can heal all people.
For the chemistry that works on one patient,
May not work for the next,
Because even medicine has its own
Conditions.
Before asserting a prognosis on any patient,
Always be objective and never subjective.
For telling a man that he will win the treasure of life,
But then later discovering that he will lose,
Will harm him more than by telling him
That he may lose,
But then he wins.


THE MAXIMS OF MEDICINE by Suzy Kassem”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“Stigma against mental illness is a scourge with many faces, and the medical community wears a number of those faces.”
― Elyn R. Saks

“No one would ever say that someone with a broken arm or a broken leg is less than a whole person, but people say that or imply that all the time about people with mental illness.”
― Elyn R. Saks

“Mental illness" is among the most stigmatized of categories.' People are ashamed of being mentally ill. They fear disclosing their condition to their friends and confidants-and certainly to their employers.”
― Elyn R. Saks, Refusing Care: Forced Treatment and the Rights of the Mentally Ill

“You can't compare men or women with mental disorders to the normal expectations of men and women in without mental orders. Your dealing with symptoms and until you understand that you will always try to find sane explanations among insane behaviors. You will always have unreachable standards and disappointments. If you want to survive in a marriage to someone that has a disorder you have to judge their actions from a place of realistic expectations in regards to that person's upbringing and diagnosis.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Having DID is, for many people, a very lonely thing. If this book reaches some people whose experiences resonate with mine and gives them a sense that they aren't alone, that there is hope, then I will have achieved one of my goals.
A sad fact is that people with DID spend an average of almost seven years in the mental health system before being properly diagnosed and receiving the specific help they need. During that repeatedly misdiagnosed and incorrectly treated, simply because clinicians fail to recognize the symptoms. If this book provides practicing and future clinicians certain insight into DID, then I will have accomplished another goal.
Clinicians, and all others whose lives are touched by DID, need to grasp the fundamentally illusive nature of memory, because memory, or the lack of it, is an integral component of this condition. Our minds are stock pots which are continuously fed ingredients from many cooks: parents, siblings, relatives, neighbors, teachers, schoolmates, strangers, acquaintances, radio, television, movies, and books. These are the fixings of learning and memory, which are stirred with a spoon that changes form over time as it is shaped by our experiences. In this incredibly amorphous neurological stew, it is impossible for all memories to be exact.
But even as we accept the complex of impressionistic nature of memory, it is equally essential to recognize that people who experience persistent and intrusive memories that disrupt their sense of well-being and ability to function, have some real basis distress, regardless of the degree of clarity or feasibility of their recollections.
We must understand that those who experience abuse as children, and particularly those who experience incest, almost invariably suffer from a profound sense of guilt and shame that is not meliorated merely by unearthing memories or focusing on the content of traumatic material. It is not enough to just remember. Nor is achieving a sense of wholeness and peace necessarily accomplished by either placing blame on others or by forgiving those we perceive as having wronged us. It is achieved through understanding, acceptance, and reinvention of the self.”
― Cameron West, First Person Plural: My Life as a Multiple

“Janna knew - Rikki knew — and I knew, too — that becoming Dr Cameron West wouldn't make me feel a damn bit better about myself than I did about being Citizen West. Citizen West, Citizen Kane, Sugar Ray Robinson, Robinson Crusoe, Robinson miso, miso soup, black bean soup, black sticky soup, black sticky me. Yeah. Inside I was still a fetid and festering corpse covered in sticky blackness, still mired in putrid shame and scorching self-hatred. I could write an 86-page essay comparing the features of Borderline Personality Disorder with those of Dissociative Identity Disorder, but I barely knew what day it was, or even what month, never knew where the car was parked when Dusty would come out of the grocery store, couldn't look in the mirror for fear of what—or whom—I'd see.
~ Dr Cameron West describes living with DID whilst studying to be a psychologist.”
― Cameron West, First Person Plural: My Life as a Multiple

“Worries about the power of a doctor's suggestions to influence and shape his patient's mind, whether they are made under hypnosis or not, are still with us.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Shaking Woman, or A History of My Nerves

“...American psychology effectively guaranteed its place as a cultural icon by helping to create the pathologies it simultaneously promised to treat. (p. 37)”
― Alvin Dueck, Peaceable Psychology, A: Christian Therapy in a World of Many Cultures

“While many autistic people face great challenges as children, things become even harder once they reach adulthood. Suddenly, society expects you to be “an adult” and behave and function as such. It is such a shame that exactly at the point in their lives when they need it the most, the support they receive from organizations and resources often stops. Because I was diagnosed at 21, I never received any support as a child. After I received my diagnosis, my mother tried to find all kinds of resources, but she soon realized that I was too old for much of anything.”
― Casey "Remrov" Vormer, Connecting With The Autism Spectrum: How To Talk, How To Listen, And Why You Shouldn’t Call It High-Functioning

“She was diagnosed with leukemia when Lily was six months old.... Diana and I had looked at each other, no clue, nowhere to begin, certainly no answers, other than the largest answer, that is, the answer that emerged in how, despite or maybe in lieu of the terror of the situation, our bodies had involuntarily gravitated toward each other, how our petty grudges and growing disagreements—all the fissures and loggerheads that had been emerging in our marriage—had given way.”
― Charles Bock

“You'd have to ask Leyla if you want to know more. She's a psychologist. One of a dozen on board. We don't just want our passengers to survive—we want them to be OK. We're dealing with a lot of trauma. So if you ever need to talk..."
"I'll pass."
"Bad experiences?"
"Sort of."
"What happened?"
I shrug. "It took a long time to diagnose me."
"From what I understand, autistic girls often don't run into trouble until a later age."
I bark out a laugh. Oh, I ran into trouble, all right. I barely said a word between the ages of four and six. I hit three of my preschool and grade school teachers. In a class photo taken when I was seven, my face is covered in scratches from when I latched onto a particularly bad stim. Therapists and teachers labelled me as bipolar, as psychotic, as having oppositional defiant disorder, as intellectually disabled, and as just straight-up difficult, the same way Els did. One said all I needed was structure and a gluten-free diet.
When I was nine, a therapist suggested I might be autistic, at which point I had already started to learn what set me off and how to mimic people; within two years, I was coping well enough to almost-but-not-quite blend in with my classmates. It's funny when people like Els have no idea anything is off about me, given that my parents spend half my childhood worrying I'd end up institutionalized.
At the time, I thought the diagnosis was delayed because I was bad at being autistic, just like I was bad at everything else; it took me years to realize that since I wasn't only Black, but a Black girl, it's like the DSM shrank to a handful of options, and many psychologists were loath to even consider them.”
― Corinne Duyvis, On the Edge of Gone

“If you can't say what is happening in the brain, nobody will care.”
― Suzanne O'Sullivan, The Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories of Mystery Illness

“Question everything. Get a second opinion (or more). Push for what you need. Don’t take no for an answer.”
― Lisa Manyon, Spiritual Sugar: The Divine Ingredients to Heal Yourself With Love

“I was initially misdiagnosed with an abscessed tooth. When in reality, I had a rapidly growing aggressive cancerous tumor in my throat. Had I listened and trusted this misdiagnosis, I wouldn’t be writing this today. #truth”
― Lisa Manyon, Spiritual Sugar: The Divine Ingredients to Heal Yourself With Love

“It's just, I have this vision, you know? A world where your diagnosis doesn't define you, and getting help doesn't make you weak or dangerous or other. And sometimes I forget the world isn't there yet.”
― Erin Stewart

“Diagnosis is the art of discernment, of distinguishing one state from another. But how exactly do we define the boundaries of what is normal? This question has dominated the scientific investigation of addiction, and mental illness more generally, for decades.”
― Carl Erik Fisher, The Urge: Our History of Addiction

“To achieve a diagnostic assessment, it is important to remember that diagnosis does not hinge on the subjects answer to any single question on the SCID-D. A positive response regarding one dissociative symptom often has several possible ramifications, which must be explored through persistence with related questions. Isolated dissociative symptoms may occur in a number of different psychiatric syndromes, both dissociative and nondissociative. An isolated dissociative symptom, such as use of an alternate name or an amnestic episode, is insufficient grounds for diagnosis. To provide evidence sufficient for an accurate diagnosis, the symptom must exist in combination with other symptoms that, as a group, conform to the characteristic pattern of one of the five disorders oudined in the Diagnostic Work Sheets in Appendix 2.”
― Marlene Steinberg, Interviewer's Guide to the Structured Clinical Interview for Dsm-IV Dissociative Disorders

“Self-diagnosis is a modern day healthcare crisis.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Vande Vasudhaivam: 100 Sonnets for Our Planetary Pueblo

“Sonnet of Self-Diagnosis

Superstition is the opium of the ill-informed public,
Conspiracy is the opium of the over-informed public.
With ten minutes of googling every flipping flat-earther
feels and behaves like a reputable rocket scientist.

Human mind has a prehistoric predisposition of paranoia,
To counteract ignorance mind cooks up brilliant fantasies.
Thus scientific expertise succumbs to facebook expertise,
Facebook groups become authority on medical diagnosis.

Self-diagnosis is a modern day healthcare crisis,
Where the patient desperately tries to redeem control.
In trying to oust the experts from science and medicine,
Google certified society only heralds its own funeral.

Take people out of healthcare, and healthcare is dead.
Take doctors out of healthcare, and healthcare is damage.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Vande Vasudhaivam: 100 Sonnets for Our Planetary Pueblo

“The value of any diagnosis is what it has to offer the sufferer.”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“Dividing human differences into distinct illnesses is like dividing up the color spectrum into distinct colors. While most of us can easily tell the difference between yellow and orange, we probably can't agree on exactly where yellow ends and orange begins because there is no single point at which one becomes the other. Similarly, the border between health and sickness is the judgment call we make about whether a person's symptoms are impairing their lives and warrant treatment.”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“I wish I could go back in time to my life before The News. Before my eyes would seek the arms on the clock like a tic just to calculate: A few minutes ago, my life was different. An hour ago, I didn’t know. Twenty-four hours ago, I had no idea my life was about to change forever. Friday, one week later, I have a moment of normality when I first wake up. Just a moment. A single moment before remembering. At this time a week ago, I still didn’t know. For the rest of my life, I will never not know.”
― Anne Marie Wells, Survived By: A Memoir in Verse + Other Poems

“The drought came with the volcano. Street lamps frowned through ash-made dark. Homes turned into hills with chimneys peeking out the summits. We hummed as we trudged through the wreckage, until our hums
turned into songs. We didn’t know what else to do. Tears wouldn’t water the grass. Cries wouldn’t call the birds home.”
― Anne Marie Wells, Survived By: A Memoir in Verse + Other Poems

“Two great pains mark my grief trail like cairns:
knowing that it was going to happen, and it happening. But unlike cairns, I can never navigate back the way I came.”
― Anne Marie Wells, Survived By: A Memoir in Verse + Other Poems

“First I have to discover what exactly is wrong with each patient. Medical students today don't spend enough time on simple diagnostic skills. They rely too heavily on technology. But when you have a whole bunch of symptoms and a complicated medical history, you have to listen and look and use your hands.”
― Gretel Ehrlich, A Match to the Heart: One Woman's Story of Being Struck By Lightning