History of Mental Health Topic Proposal
Misdiagnosis is an inextricable part of neurodivergent people’s lives and the history of mental health writ large. Sufferers can spend years, if not entire lifetimes receiving incorrect treatment for their condition(s), significantly altering their experience. However, this fact is often eclipsed in historiographical accounts by discussions around mental asylums’ poor health standards and unsafe medical practices. Considering misdiagnosis rates remain high today, it is worth learning how common and by what means this phenomenon historically occurred. This project will specifically follow incorrect diagnoses of bipolar disorder––both false positives and false negatives––due to the disease’s uniquely harmful effects and the narrow treatment path its sufferers require. Individuals with bipolar disorder often later admit to having seen their initial BD diagnosis as incorrect due to their manic symptoms, further complicating this topic. The negative effects of misdiagnosis should be assessed among other historical failures to better assess the psychiatric community’s contributions to overall patient suffering and identify points of future improvement.
This project will use autobiographies from those suffering from mental illnesses and with experience in psychiatric facilities to frame its main arguments. Key works include The Pits and the Pendulum: A Life with Bipolar Disorder by Jessica Kingsley and A Quiet Mind by Sean Blackwell. Medical works following specific diseases’ changes in classification criteria will explain diagnostic failures during this period––roughly the 1970’s onward. To this point, Mason, Brittany, Brown, and Croarkin’s Historical Underpinnings of Bipolar Disorder Diagnostic Criteria and Jablensky’s The Failure of Nosologists will be instrumental, seeing as manic-depression and schizophrenia were often the go-to misdiagnoses for bipolar disorder. Collating these sources, we begin to see how and why bipolar disorder misdiagnosis occurs, and the human impact it incurs. In doing this, we learn how to prevent these mistakes in the future to forestall future suffering.
