Your Feels > A Psychology Doctor’s 8+ years of education

This is the truth.

Because all of those years of education go into one thing and one thing only.

Learning how to interpret the feelings of a patient.

So literally, in the most literal sense of the word, your feelings are higher on the scale of importance to your diagnosis than a doctor’s education.

Because if the doctor fails to interpret your feelings then that doctor will not diagnose you correctly. Likewise if you don’t communicate how you’re feeling, what’s going on inside your head, to the doctor, their diagnosis will be wrong as well (or no dx will be given even though something is still up)

In the end, you’re the one living in your brain. You’re the one experiencing the effects of whatever mental illness you have. You are the best and single authority on what you’re feeling.

And a doctor bases their diagnoses (if not entirely than a significant portion) off of what they hear from you on that.

So a person who pretends that doctors’ derive their dxes purely from their university degrees is the most ignorant pile of shit in the world.

This is why self dxing in this day and age is so often accurate even when the self dxer has no background in the field. Because you live every single day inside your head, experiencing what it’s doing, communicating with other people who’s heads work differently or the same, comparing and contrasting and figuring things out.

With the internet, it’s no wonder that people are looking up the same exact diagnostic criteria and peer reviewed journal articles and coming to conclusions that if not wholly accurate are at least very close to what a doctor would say.

Now if you think this is some kind of anti medical field screed? It isn’t. Doctor diagnoses are great to have. They are, in a lot of cases, really beneficial, namely because they enable you to get treatment for shit that’s hurting you. They’re just very cost prohibitive to get in places like the US and doctor bigotries (because unfortunately doctors are still human and can still be oppressive fuckwads, in fact their social power often makes them even more oppressive) make it impossible for people facing a lot of oppressions at once or certain key oppressions that already involve medical abuse to access doctor diagnoses safely.

Those are all flaws with the medical field that should be fought so that people can get the medical help they need. Because it’s awful that there’s people who can only self dx and can’t get more. That’s no good. But let’s not pretend that’s a self dxers fault and let’s not pretend you’re concerned for the self dxers’ safety or health.

In the end, anyone who shames self dxers or says statements like “a doctor’s education will always be more important than your feelings” not only inherently fails to understand oppression dynamics, access problems from poverty and even how psychology works as a medical field of practice, they are really here to posit a likely abled (the psych field is pretty gross to mentally ill and neurodiverse med students and doctors), generally privileged (because becoming a doctor is tough if you’ve got a lot of oppressed aspects) as the best authority over our existences as disabled people.

It’s all about dehumanization and it is ableism, along with a host of other isms.