Mental disorder misdiagnosis affecting friends, shidduchim and status.

I don’t understand what you are saying. The “child” was diagnosed and then nothing…..left to her own devices???? No therapies, no follow-ups, no efforts made on her behalf????

And you are saying this is the fault of the doctor who diagnosed her? Where are the parents in all this? Did the parents allow proper testing? Did the parents take her to the right doctors? Did the parents go for a second opinion? Did the parents take her to the appropriate specialists, find her the right schooling or programs?

If the parents would have followed through like they should have, they would have found out that their child did not have the disease she was diagnosed with.

“Diagnosis sometimes helps, but should it be done?”

i take umbrage at that for two reasons. firstly because you obviously don’t understand mental illness, or you do but are being intentionally vague. since asperger’s is in the DSM it technically is a mental illness…but whatever ill move past that.

the bit about you not understanding mental illness is more from your statement that diagnosis sometimes helps. you obviously dont know what the word helps means either. lets start with mental illness. mental illness is either a physical deformity or chemical imbalance in the brain which causes other than normal behaviour. it is called mental ILLNESS because it is an ILLNESS.

now lets swap mental illness with COPD. Does diagnosis help with COPD? Should it be done? youd be cracked if you said no. once you can wrap your mind around the fact that mental illness is just as legitimate an illness as heart disease then you wont be asking such questions. diagnosis itself doesnt help, but once a person is diagnosed then they can get the help they need. but you said that your friend was misdiagnosed and i can understand that it makes you wary of doctors and diagnoses, so lets move on to part two of your question: should it be done?

the answer, of course, is yes. lets go back to COPD. there are false positives for heart and lung diseases all the time, does that mean they shouldnt be done? taking as given that youve accepted that mental illness is a legitimate illness, suppose your friend really had aspergers and therefore couldnt react properly to normal social and interpersonal emotional cues, do you not think that would cause some issues in a marriage? do you not think that would cause issues with kids?

now im not saying that someone with aspergers has to give up a meaningful life with a spouse and children, but it must be treated in order for them to have that. otherwise they’ll never know why they could never have what everyone else wants and has. and i can tell you from personal experience that if someone goes ahead and builds a family despite the fact that they have untreated mental disorders, the consequences can be extremely severe.

so your friend was a false positive, a misdiagnosis and now shadchanim are wary because of the misdiagnosis. i wish your friend only the best in life, and that she should find her zivug and b’ezras hashem build a bayis neeman b’yisrael and that she should have only success and health. but what you have to realize is that its not the mental health system that’s the problem. its a system and systems are imperfect and will generate false positives every now and again, and it IS important for the system to continue so that the other 99.99% can get the diagnosis and treatment they need.

asperger’s by the way would be a legitimate concern to shadchanim so i would understand if a shadchan would be wary of someone who actually had it, but since your friend was misdiagnosed, and mistama the shadchanim know that (maybe get proof from a doctor? i know its a pain but maybe that would help?) then its the shadchanim’s problem, not the mental health system’s.

that being said, perhaps there are other ways she can go about finding a shidduch? is there a family rav who knows her well who would be able to either find her someone or find a shadchan who isnt as narrow minded? maybe a family friend who knows people and does shidduchim as a hobby? idk these are suggestions that are just coming to me, but maybe she can find a shidduch in other ways that the standard open a phone book, dial a shadchan, buy a husband…idk how these things work.

EDIT: obtw just out of curiosity…is the misdiagnosis official? did a doctor officially say that she was misdiagnosed?

I was not diagnosed til my early 20’s. I’m thinking back to my elementary and highschool years and wondering how much better they would have been had I know what was wrong with me. I would have been on medidcine, I would have been in the right kind of therapy and (omg, whoaaa this is like crazy uneard of) I would have been hospitalized during those times that I very desperately needed to be. I am totally not blaming my parents or my Drs. Actually it is my fault. I refused to go onto meds, refused to see a psychiatrist or a/t but I do know if I was forced into the hospital with no choice in the long run I would have appreciated it!

to post an opinion

In mental health since there are very few if any physical tests if any available i.e. blood work/MRI/X-rays it is basically upto the medical professional to make the call on the diagnosis based on observations and evaluations done during a visit – many illnesses have similar symptoms that may be a cause for a diagnosis or misdiagnosis the same as would be with a physical illness where if you go for a second opinion for something that is possible to test i.e. stomach ulcer / fissures etc you may hear different opinions on treatment it is much more so on illnesses that is pretty much a grey area and can only be diagnosed by observing/hearing.

However not going to a medical professional just because there may be a misdiagnosis is preventing the patient the basic right of being helped … and just like any other medical issue if you are not happy there is always the option of getting a second opinion.

understanding that there are ramifications of a diagnosis not going is like making a person with a broken leg go up & down stairs.

It is a problem if that is the case – however there are children & adults that need help – by not doing what is needed it just postpones the problem and probably makes it worse.

as a statistic 90% of people with a mental condition that is not being taken care for ends in divorce where if it is taken care of they can lead an almost “normal” life.

so the question is do you take care and risk a stigma but give the patient a chance at a productive life or don’t take care and have them struggle thru the rest of their life.

Sidi

Why do you think having a shadow kills them?

Do they stick out more because of the shadow or because of the issue necessitating the shadow?

As a parent of a child with a shadow I can tell you it’s often the latter.

A child who struggles to keep up academically begins to be viewed differently by the class. A child who has difficulty focusing or who becomes easily distracted and interferes with the work of others because he seeks stimulation also sticks out.

We actually revealed to a camp that my son was on meds for ADHD. They became apprehensive about their ability to manage him when, in fact, he was extraordinarily compliant because of it. There’s just no easy way.

there are certain diagnoses (thats not a misspell)

“Diagnoses” was spelled correctly, then you missed an apostrophe in “that’s” and used the verb “misspell” instead of the noun “misspelling.”

One out of three isn’t bad. (For the CR, it’s amazingly good.)

@haifagirl stopped reading before I got halfway through your first sentence. No one really cares to read about spelling/grammar mistakes….on the internet.

@OP If something looks wrong with your kid you should check it out. But just to take a kid to a psychologist “to be safe”!? You can visit 50 different psychologists and they will all rip you off with 50 different issues they “find”. Everyone has psychological issues but the majority of them do not require a psychologist. You would not find a single person in the entire world or it’s history that would not have some psychological issue according to modern psychologists after their inspections and greed.

I personally had seen people who were perfectly “normal” have some retarded psychologist tell them they had problems. I have studied a lot of psychology and i can easily say that it would take me only 5 minutes with anyone on earth before I can somehow or another relate some “problem” that they have and need meds for.

zeena.kasta,

Ask the moderators for my email. I know someone who might be a good shidduch for your friend.

A diagnosis of Aspergers is a challenging one to make, and it requires an expert or more than one.. But it is not a “black mark” by any means, unless it is so severe to the point of autism-like symptoms (Aspergers is identified as an Autism spectrum disorder, but it doesn’t usually manifest in the same way)

Also, Aspergers is very often associated with high or very high intelligence, so stigma associated with it is a big ??? to me. The diagnosis is made as a function of evidence.

In the case of Aspergers, there is a distinct lack of socialization and obliviousness to social cues that will have been there before any diagnosis, as is the exclusionary focus of interest onto one thing or idea. Social stigma follows from the behavior more than from a rumored diagnosis of what is often a high function disorder.

Aspergers does, however, often have associations with other diagnoses for other issues, co-morbid with it, variously ADHD, Depression, OCD, and other psychological challenges. Maybe this is what was circulated.

I write this as the parent of a child diagnosed several years ago with Aspergers. Though my child certainly has had to overcome challenges in socialization, my child is Baruch Hashem healthy, doing extremely well in school, and has begun to develop relationships and friendships, and figured out workarounds to social cues utilizing intelligence rather than the more common intuition.

Rumor is a horrible thing in a school no matter what it is about, but as far as Aspergers is concerned, people like Lincoln, Einstein, Alexander Graham Bell, Newton, Jefferson, and Edison all displayed symptoms and were likely affected by the disorder, so the person affected is in good company.

aries2756 ASPERGERS IS BY NO MEANS A DISEASE!!! It’s actually quite disgusting to hear people talk like this.

Unless there is some serious malpractice going on (which could be possible; we don’t have enough details to do more than speculate) I think the situation is being blown way out of proportion. Okay, so there was a misdiagnosis, and rumors spread, etc etc and it’s hard to repair the damage. But those who really matter won’t listen to rumors and will appreciate your friend for who she is– and, furthermore, wouldn’t care even if she did have Asperger’s. I have a few close friends with Asperger’s and they’re wonderful people, and function quite well (just differently).

Making diagnoses, especially those related to mental rather than physical health, is not easy. There is a lot of “gray area” and it’s not always clear (that’s why autism is called a “spectrum”, because people present in different ways). Furthermore, especially as a youth, one can present symptoms and then have them disappear. What does that mean? Did the person really have the disorder and then it went away, or did she never really have it to begin with? It’s hard to say. Science has not advanced enough to the degree of precision that we would like, and that’s difficult to accept, but it’s true.

I would suggest to you and your friend that you stop looking for scapegoats and focus on moving forward in a positive way. Much hatzlacha.

I know someone who was diagnosed with aspergers and her family treats her like she is mentally ill or something, she has to go to all the psychologists and they are always talking behind her back, and her mother wants to put her in a special needs school. She understands that she just thinks differently, but how can she explain that to her family?

Her parents think that aspergers is a mental disorder and she should be in an asylum or at best a special needs school. She is fine, vwry high functual, barely can tell that she has it….its really sad, poor kid. I wish I could do something….

kid has friends, a social life, and very sweet…no one knows a thing. Doing great in school too….just moody at home and having problems with her family…

“Politics of experience.”

1) Why was the teacher in the room?

2) This is why many people do not seek treatment, or don’t go to frum therapists.

3) Also, the new DSM actually gets rid of Asperger’s and places it back within the Autism spectrum.