Illumination Part Two: Differential Diagnosis
a view from inside the process
I’ve been writing on the internet for twenty years or so, and for better or worse it’s how I think things out. The audience for this Substack has always been myself first; WCA and ORCCA and our organizational partners, second; and last, the internet in general. I’m constantly trying to balance the ways that this is a journal vs. an actual newsletter vs. a billboard. That balance has gotten a lot trickier in the last couple of weeks.
Thank you to everybody who sent kind words after last Monday’s post. I’m relatively okay? I’m having to figure out how to write on the internet all over again, because my old mode doesn’t work for my new reality. Like a lot of other things I do, that’s going to be a matter of trial and error. Good thing that making mistakes in public is something I’ve gotten used to.
In the near future there are probably going to be more paywalled posts. If you need a comped subscription, please let me know. Paid subscribers, WCA appreciates your contributions very much!
Content warning for all the usual stuff, but with more detail.
Picking up where we left off last week, with my stigmatized psychiatric diagnosis — there are a lot of upsides, particularly related to my relationship to the acupuncture profession. Community acupuncturists, and our little school, often get a hard time for the way we approach the issue of diagnosis. The process of getting diagnosed myself — with a condition that’s difficult to identify — was illuminating.
I’ve been wishing I could talk about it, especially at school; some of the classes I teach overlap with diagnosis (and I bet everyone would stay awake for this, lol). But now that the internet knows I have a chronic, complex dissociative disorder, I can write about it. So far OSDD is a fountain of writing prompts.
When I first met with the DD specialist, she started explaining the process of differential diagnosis and I was like, oh yes, I get it, differential diagnosis is a whole thing in my world. Good, she said, then you understand the principles. Symptoms like emotional dysregulation, disruptions of identity and perception, loss of sense of self, and derealization occur across many psychiatric diagnoses, so the process is about systematically ruling things out.
