Updated June 08, 2015.

How did eight mental health care professionals mix it up and diagnose me incorrectly for more than a decade of my battle with mental illness?

In retrospect, it was easy. And boy, did it mess me up from age eighteen until I turned thirty years old. "I?d like to thank to each and every one of my doctors for screwing up," I told an audience of mental health care professionals a while back - - jokingly of course.


After all, that was fair. I played a huge part in my diagnosis and my treatment and I was responsible for the misdiagnosis, too. I wasn?t really giving any of these doctors the "complete picture" - - I misreported my symptoms, my activities and generally my behavior when I wasn?t depressed. I left out a complete "side" of my mental illness.

I couldn?t sleep for nights on end, my brain felt like their were "thought" colliding in them, I obsessed on small details from saving pennies and polishing each one of them to washing my clothing over and over in the washing machine and then there were days I was so exhausted that I slept for fifteen and sixteen hours and just felt like I had a case of the "blahs." But mostly I told my doctor about sleeping long hours and the fatigue associated with it.

"Depression, you?re suffering from depression, Andy," my doctor told me the year before I went away to college when I was eighteen years old. "It?s common among many adolescents," he assured me. "Thanks so much," I thought.

"Now I feel completely better," I wanted to say. "I?ll just live with the depression and just see if it kills me or I kill myself first," I thought to myself.

That was twenty four years ago. I didn?t really know what the diagnosis of depression meant but I certainly knew how it felt - - and it wasn?t very good to feel the way that I was feeling day in and day out. This was in 1980 and the doctor?s method of treatment was "talk therapy" - - sitting down once or twice a weeks and telling him about my week and how I felt. We?ll get you feeling better before you go off to college," the good doctor told me. So I visited him twice a week (my mother drove me forty five minutes each way) and it was our secret that I was seeing a therapist." I remember being hopeful that the "dark feelings" would go away, but they only got worse and worse. I felt like I was the only person on the planet with this "thing called depression" and I remember being frightened. I was "knocked out" and dopey and I cried all of the time. But I had some good moments, too. I felt on top of the world at times and felt invicible. But I never told my therapist about these feelings. I didn?t think those feelings had anything to do with my "condition" or his diagnosis of adolescent depression.

Therapy with the "good doctor," as I liked to call him, was interrupted when it was time for me to leave the depression inducing suburbs of New Jersey and go away to college in the scenic countryside of Connecticut. I packed up for my freshman year and thought I would leave eighteen years of my feelings behind. But when I arrived on campus, I realized that they had followed me. Was the countryside making me feel worse or better? Worse. (So it wasn?t the suburbs after all!). I immediately sought out help from the mental health program on the campus of my university. The next week I had an appointment with one of the mental health center?s therapists. I was "assigned" to a very young therapist, an attractive woman in her early thirties. She performed a very thorough intake on me during the first session and remained particularly quiet while I answered her questions and provided me with almost no information for a few sessions as far as a diagnosis. Soon she announced some shocking news: I was suffering from adolescent depression. I couldn?t believe that this diagnosis took four or five sessions. We went on to talk about my depression twice a week for my four years at college - - quite a bit of talk therapy. We mostly discussed my childhood and my fears and frustrations. And I remember that we talked quite a bit about my colorful dreams which I kept in a notebook. I had vivid memories of drowning every other night and being chased in the subway every other. Not much more. They were quiet sessions. Since it was the early eighties, what else was there to do for my "depression?" Nobody talked about medication. I suppose talking was the best thing to do for me at the time.