Diagnonsense

Recently I've been thinking a lot about my Borderline diagnosis, and though I have some of the traits, I doubt that I really fit the diagnostic criteria. From the way I got the diagnosis in the first place it makes me feel like I'm making mental illness into an achievement, but I know I had good reasons for doing what I did at that time, even though it was sort of immoral and stupid. It's bad to cheat on a math test in school, but cheating on a diagnostic test for a personality disorders is just... I can't think of a word for it.

I had read up quite a bit about this disorder before hand, self diagnosed myself and lied to the psychologist who did the test on me. I did it cause I felt so very helpless after seven years in contact with the psychiatry without getting any help at all. I found out about DBT and I just knew I had to go to that therapy. So I found a way to get permission to do so.

Now I can't help but wonder, would I still have gotten the diagnosis if I hadn't lied? And stupid as I was (just can't stress the word “stupid” enough here...) I didn't think about that I during the therapy had to keep up those lies. That was when I still lived in Uppsala and went to the DBT there. When I later moved to Gotland and started over in a new group and with a new psychologist my lies started to rift. My then new DBT psychologist is a very smart and kind woman who really knows her stuff. She also has some knowledge about Asperger since she used to work at the neuro-psychiatric department i Visby before.

It felt as if she saw right through me when she started to say that most of my problems I brought up during our sessions stemmed from my Asperger traits, and not from Borderline traits. If it is true that I've been misdiagnosed, I will still keep quiet about my mischief, cause I still believe it's helpful in some ways. Dreading the day I will have to open up and speak the truth about everything. I even slipped once, I don't remember what I said, but she asked me "are you hearing voices?" and I quickly got a little snappy and cryptic which might not have been the best way to deal with the situation. I replied "would you write it up in my medical record if I said yes?" and she said she couldn't answer that, to which I replied "well, in that case: no, I don't hear any voices" to which she gave me a snarky look in disbelief.

I have ever since not been able to let go of the query if she did write something about that in my medical record. All the time I have to cover for Anna, Vargyl, Satan, the whispers and the raspy voices by saying that I just have a very cluttered mind. And if you squint a little, that could almost be considered partially true, since the voices are indeed inside my mind, cluttering it. But it's not just the voices I lie about. My ever so present delusions, halfly slipping into psychosis. I had a whole weekend fighting off imaginary lice and ignoring talking curtains, talking out loud in long conversations with Vargyl who I actually believed was real at that time. He is a green skinned goblin from World of Warcraft. Of course he's not bloody real. So I suppose you could legitimately call that a psychosis.

Another time I lived on crackers for two weeks cause I was terrified of going outside, I had no other food, because I truly believed people could see me in my true demonic form when they looked at me.

Yet another time I believed I had entered another dimension. A world that was an almost exact replica of the real world, but I was absolutely confident it wasn't the real world I was in anymore.

Then we have this strange thing when I let Anna take over and control my body, as some form of mental shift. First I thought it was a dissociation/a multiple personality thingy, but now I'm pretty sure it was rather a delusion, or a depersonalisation.

I have almost every listed trait of Schizophrenia, and I don't doubt for a second that if I was to come clean about all of this I'd get that diagnose. I've known that on and off since I was 12 and I guess the coin finally fell into place. Sure my hallucinations and delusions are fairly mild and harmless, or maybe I'm just a harmless person, but the thing is that it's very hard for me to pin exactly what is real and not. That, is also a symptom. I'm never sure, and as soon as something seems out of place I immediately start questioning it's validity. I don't think I'll ever be able to understand the full extent of what really is hallucinations of everything I perceive.

Well, this truly is an itch I cannot scratch. Self diagnosing gives me a little tunnel vision, but I've never before been so sure about a diagnose as with this one. I've never felt that sting in my gut like that before. I've always known. Even as a 12 year old I connected the fact that I heard voices with Schizophrenia, even though I was way too young and uneducated to fully understand what I was dooming myself with. But I was right all along. If this really is true, then I was a very early onset at the young age of 9. It's not impossible, I heard about a fairly recent case of a 7 year old that got diagnosed, it's very, very rare though. And even if I someday get diagnosed, I doubt they would consider it as I would have had it basically my whole life. This is also why I reconsider my Borderline diagnosis. Schizophrenia would completely replace it. So as of now, I just keep until due time. Handy, but imperfect.

This post became slightly longer than I intended. Sorry 'bout that. The title is inspired from the movie “Girl, interrupted”.