Why did it take so long to get diagnosed?
I kept trying to tell myself, I'm normal but my mind had different ideas. And then there is also the point where this disease constantly gets misdiagnosed. When I came in with my suicidal depression, I didn't look like the type of person that danced on tables. People have some comment to their doctor, saying, hey, I'm feeling good. Give me a pill for that. They come and saying, I'm depressed and miserable. So when my doctor saw me, though I had depression. When he gave me an antidepressant however, it flipped me up into a wildly manic state where I was actually hallucinating and that's when they figured out finally that I had bipolar disorder.
Now I was lucky they picked early; they gave me the wrong pill. But I could have continued going on for like 6 or 11 years which is somewhere -- which is the figures for how long people are misdiagnosed for. It could have been like before I was age 60 before I could then considerably diagnosed and who knows what I've would done to myself then; something reckless, something life-ending.
So yeah, it's a very, very serious problem between both the patients not wanting to admit that he's got an illness and the doctors are not picking it up.
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