Doctors often miss PTSD if they don't look for trauma

I read a lot of mental health news reports that do not get posted here because they do not involve veterans. This one is something anyone living with PTSD should know about. Psychiatrists can and often do misdiagnose PTSD as something else. If they are are not looking for a traumatic event in a life, they usually diagnose it as something else. The only way to end up with PTSD is after trauma but the symptoms can look like other forms of illness. This is the story of a woman diagnosed by different doctors.

DIAGNOSIS ROULETTE

Psychiatric patients can be labeled with numerous conditions during their treatment, labels that come to define them and their insurance status. Now psychiatry is revamping the mental-disorder book, further jumbling the picture.
By Stacey Burling
Inquirer Staff Writer

Over her life, June Sams has been told she has schizophrenia and four mental health disorders: bipolar, post-traumatic stress, major depressive, and personality. The 60-year-old Chester woman's current diagnoses - she thinks these fit - are major depressive and generalized anxiety disorders plus PTSD due to childhood trauma.

A doctor told Elisa-Beth Gardner, 51, of Swarthmore, that she had borderline personality disorder (BPD) in 1996. Three months later, she was told she had bipolar disorder. Then a doctor said she had both. Her current doctor thinks she has BPD and PTSD, but not bipolar.

When Sonia Weaver, now a 43-year-old Lancaster resident, got sick in 1997 - as a new mother and University of Chicago divinity school student - a psychiatrist said she had postpartum depression.
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