Schizophrenia is a condition defined by psychiatry. Psychiatry is not currently able to diagnose people based on the etiology of their conditions (even those it has some ideas about the etiology of); it instead defines conditions based on signs and symptoms that tend to go together. I might be persuaded to believe that those symptoms are typically caused by a neurodegenerative disease but are sometimes caused by some other condition instead, and, if there were a way to tell which etiology it was, I would believe that schizophrenia should be split up to group patients with like etiology together. However, diagnosis being what it is, I would not agree that they were misdiagnosed. They were (presumably correctly) identified as experiencing the symptoms and exhibiting the signs that are used to define schizophrenia. When they start using brain scans for diagnosis, then we can talk about misdiagnoses of people who meet the DSM criteria.
None of this is meant to imply that people don't also misdiagnose things, or that they don't ignore illnesses or engage in any other malpractice.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2013-03-20 07:46 pm (UTC)None of this is meant to imply that people don't also misdiagnose things, or that they don't ignore illnesses or engage in any other malpractice.
I agree with you about the linked post.