Sociopath Community

How can someone have a disorder and no traits of said disorder... It doesn't make sense. There was talk on the old forum that those disorders are just defined/made up based on those traits. The dsm is like a dictionary I suppose. It's as if you look up the definition of rabbit, then ask if there can be rabbits that don't fit the definition of a rabbit...

Anyway, disorders aren't fun things to have, they normally affect lives. When the disordered person or someone who knows that person goes to the doc, they usually want to hear a "label", to put a name to the shit they have, maybe have some comfort that their problems have a name/cause and that they're not alone in their condition.

i'd agree with that statement.

The DSM reminds me of WebMD lately. You can find a general idea of where you may fit but without extensive testing and consulting it won't go any further than the general idea. 

For example: http://www.nami.org/Content/NavigationMenu/Mental_Illnesses/Schizophrenia9/Diagnosing_Schizophrenia.htm

The DSM-IV contains five sub-classifications of schizophrenia. However, as scientific knowledge changes the diagnostic criteria for diagnosing schizophrenia changes as well. The developers of the DSM-5, to be published in 2013, are recommended that the classifications be dropped.

The DSM isn't set in stone, it's constantly changing and even then the changes aren't fluid but have been debated and rehashed only to be included in the next edition which will be a year behind. 

Edit: Also I believe there are undocumented traits for disorders and as the link I posted states there is a link between certain disorders and culture. This alone opens up a whole other set of possibilities in terms of diagnosing. 

I'll stick with the shallow side of this thread. DSM is not seen as a good tool anymore. For a long while it was seen as objective and good, because in the history of psychology there was a huge stress on causes. Especially childhood. For many disorders they got the causes really wrong. Like thinking a phobia represented your mother and such nonsense.

DSM became popular because it had a new view, like Lets realize everything has a cause but we need to understand we don't know the causes. So lets work what we know, and that is what we see, the signs and symptoms.

Back then it was really needed to break with the former view of Freudian nonsense. But now DSM gets a lot of criticism because it does not include causes, especially when brain imaging is getting better and could be a way of understanding the neurological aspect of a disorder.

Also disorders come and go with different DSM editions. Kind of tells you there are no real disorders, just disordered people. Two disorders that overlap the way we see today might be called a new thing and seen as a new disorder tomorrow.

But this isn't involving rabbits, this is more general like the order in which rabbits reside; Lagomorpha. This order includes two families, one being rabbits and hares the other being pikas. If you were to see a pika would you know it was related to a rabbit? No, probably not. 

apart from genetics, you can also get disordered, but learn to control/adapt it, which in turn means you are not so disordered. i think therapy realistically can only offer to help you that much. but they seem to love to give you pills too 

Enough traits simply denote the possibility of a disorder, especially the case since Psych is a speculative science. Sometimes a misdiagnosis can happen from seeing some of the traits without identifying all of them (believe me). A disorder is like a folder where you happen to lump all of those files together, so it's quite easy for some files to not be categorized somewhere, if not mistakenly put into a folder it doesn't belong inside of.

If they only have a few of the traits, either they're just quirks or they may be a sign of things to come as new symptoms develop overtime. An example brought up from my former Abnormal Psychology class: A lot of people have superstitions or behaviors that reflect behaviors similar to OCD/OCPD, but if it's not throwing a spanner into their lives and they don't have too many of them, they are just written off as quirks.

It's important when looking for traits to not limit yourself to the belief of it meaning they must have a single specific disorder. A disorder's label, to me, is like how a medical term can work in that it denotes what behaviors they are likely to express. Many disorders can reflect traits related to dulled/over-reactive emotions for example, as well as difficulty in school, and comorbidity only make identifying answers that much more effort.


SensitiveSoul: "Also disorders come and go with different DSM editions."

Homosexuality used to be listed as one.

I've thought this for a while. The DSM reads like a horoscope in that you an apply any of the entries to anyone if you look hard enough for criteria. Surely it must be used as a diagnostics shortcut, rather than the be all end all of clinical psychiatry?

Being an expert is the point. Just looking at a definition of something isn't enough in that case.