Medical Students' Disease

Many of you must be confused by the topic title I have chosen for this article but I assure you it is very much so relevant. If you are reading this blog it is likely you have visited other sites and communities discussing different issues, disorders, and syndromes and likewise you are likely well acquainted with them.
So you might ask, “How exactly does a disease I have never heard of that by the name seems to exclusively affect medical students at all relevant to mental health or suicide?!” I will get to that very soon. Medical students disease is not actually a disease at all, it is actually a phenomenon of which I call self-diagnosis syndrome (It has a proper name but I don't feel like using it). This phenomenon usually occurs in the second and third semester of medical school where students start studying diseases. Basically what happens is some students while reading the signs and symptoms of the diseases they study start to believe that they may also have the disease because they too have one or two of the symptoms etc. Over time medical students learn to properly diagnose disease under the guidance of qualified doctors. You see, diagnostic manual descriptions of diseases tend to be broad enough to qualify just about anyone for a positive diagnosis, because of this we have experienced professionals interpreting them instead of just anyone. For example, if you have a fever you could have anything from the flu to mid-stage Ebola (yikes!). Medical professionals take care to take into account both the likelihood and as many symptoms as possible before making a diagnosis. Even then they can still misdiagnose an illness. That’s why a doctor at the sight of a temperature of 99℉ doesn't jump up and start screaming “Ebola!” and run away.  So how does this relate to mental health?

Just like in medicine, diagnostic manuals exist for mental health issues too (DSM, ICD-10). When these signs and symptoms are published to the inexperienced and untrained general public imaginations go wild. “Feeling down for a few days? You have depression!” starts to become the mindset. I have talked to people who self medicate simply based off of a diagnosis they received from a single internet search. Once I had the opportunity to talk to a clinical psychologist about how they diagnose mental health issues in individuals. The reply I received in return was something along the lines of this: “ When diagnosing a patient we take into consideration the number of signs they display, length of time the signs and symptoms have persisted for, and lifestyle.” I’m going to pick on depression a lot right now as it seems to be one of the larger self-diagnosed mental health issues. Depression is a fairly broad term, in writing it generally refers to the emotion of deep sadness, in clinical psychology however it refers to an actual illness with multiple variants. Individuals who feel “depressed” have the possibility of self-diagnosing themselves with clinical depression. This can be quite dangerous not just towards the fact that they may choose to self-harm or try to self-medicate in advance, but also because the attitude that they have a mental illness may put them on a term used in psychology called a “negative feedback loop”. The symptoms used by NIMH to diagnose clinical depression are fairly broad and include things such as “Feelings of hopelessness or pessimism, irritability and restlessness, etc”. This is the issue, it is almost too easy to assign yourself a disease as basic human nature tends to fit right into every description and because of this I see a massive amount of self-diagnosis for clinical depression especially. Things like feeling down for a month or having a relationship go downhill is no doubt crappy and can cause you to act differently, but by no means constitutes depression. I guess what I am saying is that if you believe you have something, talk to a qualified professional, no matter how sure you are about it, and if you don’t like the diagnosis get a second opinion. Not just can self diagnosis be dangerous to the individual practicing it but it can also negatively affect loved ones.

-- Suicide/ Mental Health Group

Suicide/ Mental Health Group 

Sources: 
- DSM- American Psychiatric Association 
- ICD-10- WHO       
- NIMH- About    
- Medical Students' Disease- Wikipedia  
- NIMH- General classifications of Depression