If your doctor has the new Somatic Symptom Disorder information and doesn’t know what is wrong with you, there’s a possibility that you could be mislabeled and misdiagnosed as mentally ill- in error. Yes, such is the new horrible situation for you and thousands more like you that you could be classed as having a mental illness when that is not what’s wrong at all!

According to the British Medical Journal 2013, the revised listing for Somatic Symptom Disorder according to new DSM-5 guidelines surely will mean that we can expect more confusion than ever between diagnoses of physical and mental symptoms. And surely there was enough already for people with symptoms of Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome!

How many times have you heard people say 1) “it’s all in your head“? How many times have people 2) looked at you funny, 3) discounted your memory recall of an event or 4) your opinion because they no longer have faith in you? How many times have you been 5) accused of sounding “out of this world” or crazy? More times than these five examples for sure. Situations like this occur when our family, friends, co-workers or medical doctors don’t know enough about our physical illnesses to understand what we’re going through. They don’t see that there are physical causes in making you appear to be mentally ill.

I urge you to take the time today to read up on this important topic (below) and then leave your own comment. I shudder to think how easily details about Somatic Symptom Disorder cold blow up in our lives and cause a national (if not, international) disaster!

This new condition (a.k.a. Somatic Symptom Disorder) suggested in the bible of mental health diagnoses lacks specificity, says Allen Frances.

(Today’s audio podcast is 5 minutes 38 seconds. Don’t miss it!)

The fuzzy boundary between psychiatry and general medicine is about to experience a seismic shift. The next edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is scheduled for release this May amid controversy about many of its new disorders. Among these, DSM-5 introduces a poorly tested diagnosis—somatic symptom disorder—which risks mislabeling a sizeable proportion of the population as mentally ill.

The relation between psychiatry and the rest of medicine has been difficult to manage both for mental health practitioners and for primary care doctors, and this is even more problematic for patients caught in-between.

The boundary has never been clear cut or static but has shifted back and forth depending on new findings and fashions. The realm of psychiatry would shrink, and that of medicine would expand, whenever advancing science discovered a cause for a previously poorly understood presentation. The classic example of this is “general paresis of the insane,†which went from psychiatry to neurology as soon as the spirochete was identified as the causal agent.

To me, this last paragraph should speak to the people who thought Lyme disease patients were crazy. Have a spirochete anyone? If history is a precursor to the future, it will be painfully long before we learn what we need to know about Somatic Symptom Disorder. Until then, we have to be prepared and ready to dispute false notions such as…it’s all in your head.

Thanks so much, Cinda Crawford

Health Matters Show