Everyday 18-22 American Veterans Commit Suicide and The Department of Veteran's Affairs Still Shows

[Jackpine Radical]

2. "Overlap" bullshit.

Most individuals with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) have histories of extreme and early abuse, often sexual abuse, and many of them can be diagnosed with PTSD. About 3/4 of BPD cases in the general population are women, and most of them were subjected to sexual abuse in childhood.

As for Bipolar Disorder, this is often misdiagnosed in PTSD and BPD cases. Emotional lability is misdiagnosed as a cyclic pattern of alternating depression & manic phases. The key to separating the 2 is, first, taking a good history, and second, noting how rapidly the "mood crashes" alternate with euphoria (or manic irritability). True Bipolar Disorder follows a distinct cyclic pattern of weeks or months, while the emotional lability associated with the PTSD-related conditions can occur within a few days, hours or even minutes.

There are 2 reasons psychiatrists tend to misdiagnose Bipolar when the true condition is PTSD-related. First, they often take 10-minute "intake histories," thereby never even asking the right questions; and second, there are pharmacological means of treating Bipolar Disorders, while there are none (except for marginal symptom-suppression) for the PTSD-related conditions, and psychiatry is heavily biased toward "biological" diagnoses that can be treated with drugs.