Sharon Begley wrote a piece for NEWSWEEK which she starts out with these words, “For doctors who treat illnesses that strike from the neck down, a patient's symptoms are only the first step toward a diagnosis. No sooner do they hear ‘It hurts when I climb stairs’ than they order blood work, X-rays or other tests. In psychiatry, though, the laundry list of symptoms is it, the only basis for diagnosis. Maybe that helps explain why 70 percent of patients with bipolar disorder are misdiagnosed, as are up to half of women with depression.”

Remember my last blog. I wrote about why we had to get the diagnosis right for our kids because psych meds were not health foods. Well, it turns out that I am not the only one writing on the subject of how difficult it is to get the proper diagnosis and then to get on the right meds.

A year ago I had to go off the main medication I take for my bipolar disorder and a year later I am still trying to find the right med and dosage to do the job as well as was being done by the med I had to go off of. I have spent a year close to mania and in fear of breaking through into full blown mania. My wife’s life has not been as pleasant to say the least.

She goes on to write, “The American Psychiatric Association is updating its immense (911 pages) diagnostic manual, which offers 20 forms of bipolar disorder alone.”

I wonder which form I have. I have the form that as a friend of mine says I wish I could “move off and leave behind.” The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Text Revision (DSM-IV-TR®) is the bible, but are there really 20 different forms of my disorder?

Then she writes, “EEGs let you look at patients the way cardiologists do with EKGs, focusing on physiology, not symptoms," says psychiatrist William Richardson, who is at Overlook Hospital and in private practice in Summit, N.J. Brain measurements like EEGs not only offer the possibility of better treatment for mental illness, however. They also show that the line from brain to mind can meander like a mountain stream. For an EEG, which typically costs about $150 and takes 45 minutes, a patient has about 20 electrodes pasted to his scalp, where they measure the electrical activity of neurons—brain waves—directly beneath. In the 1980s, researchers tried to base diagnoses on EEGs, but it didn't work. The same squiggles could mean different illnesses, and one illness could be marked by different EEGs. The new use of EEGs skips the diagnosis (a label like "anxiety disorder") and goes straight to a recommended treatment. An EEG is compared with a database that includes 13,000 pairings of EEGs with which drugs helped in each case. A California company called CNS Response, which runs the database, finds a match and sends the physician an analysis indicating which drugs patients with that EEG are sensitive or resistant to.”

Now I love mountain streams. There is nothing more beautiful than a trout stream here in Western North Carolina. I take that back. My wife is. Her beauty inside and outside has done more for my darkened soul than even the mountain streams of these beautiful mountains in which I live. However, the writer can not get me to like this idea by bringing to mind a mountain stream. The above is simply no way to come up with which drug to use.

She ends her piece with these words, “One reason for the sometimes-odd pairings of illnesses and drugs is that many different brain states can produce the same mental symptoms, and many different symptoms can arise from the same brain state. Now replace "symptoms" with "mind." The path from electrical firings to mind is less mechanical than neuroscience dogma suggests. The mind has not yielded all its mysteries quite yet.”

The writer just forgot a small detail. Yes we are more than a mere set of symptoms. We are even more than mind and body. We have a soul. That is why we need the embrace of faith communities which seem to shy away from us. We are fully human. We are bio-psycho-social-spiritual beings. When will you finally see us?

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