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Diagnosing Mental Illness
Mental illnesses can be mistaken as physiological ones: I have heard of a woman who was diagnosed and treated as epileptic when she was a young girl, then suffered for years because the medicine did not relieve her symptoms. It was only when she turned 16 and wanted to get a driver's license that further investigation found she really suffered from anxiety.
My diagnosis at Alhambra CPC included CAT scans of my head, blood and urine tests, an electroencephalogram and neurological tests to rule out such things as tumours and poisoning. A psychiatrist will usually do a thyroid panel before treating someone for manic depression. (There was another patient at Alhambra who arrived in a catatonic stupour and slowly awakened during our time there. It turned out that he had a physiological condition that caused the buildup of ammonia in his blood.)
However, there is no blood test for psychiatric illness; at best blood tests can rule out other physiological conditions. Tests such as Positron Emission Tomography can detect such things as the excessive metabolization of sugar in the right brain hemispheres of manic people, but PET scans are very expensive and so only commonly performed for research purposes.
Diagnosis of a mental disorder is made from the patient's history, observation of the patient's current behaviour, talking with the patient, and psychological diagnostic tests.
I had the Rorschach Inkblot Test, the Thematic Apperception Test, in which I explained what I thought to be happening in some pictures, and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory in which I answered a lengthy questionnaire about my thoughts and feelings.
I also took an IQ test. Being manic I was feeling quite intelligent, so I was appalled to find that my score was off about 20 points from the two IQ tests that school psychologists had given me as a child. The psychologist who tested me in the hospital reassured me that my brain was not degenerating, but that psychosis caused a temporary decrease in intelligence. She said my intelligence would recover when the episode passed. However she warned me that my intelligence would fail to recover fully if I had repeated manic episodes.
Need Help Paying for Mental Health Treatment?
If you don't have the money to pay for treatment you may still have options depending on where you live. Even in the United States, which does not have publicly funded health care for most illnesses, there are government-supported mental health clinics in many communities, as well as private non-profit clinics that charge their patients based on their ability to pay.
Many psychologists and psychiatrists offer sliding scales, where they charge lower income patients less money. Not everyone offers this, so you have to call around.
Some psychiatric medications are expensive; treatment with clozapine for schizophrenia, for instance, costs thousands of dollars a year. The government might assist in the cost of your medicine and some drug companies offer "compassionate drug plans" in which qualifying patients receive their medicine free of charge directly from the drug company. In addition the drug companies often give psychiatrists free advertising sample packs of drugs, which the psychiatrists then give to their patients who cannot afford to buy them.
next: Therapy for Treatment of Schizoaffective Disorder
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