Tracy9

I think Alice md has hit the nail on the head. Labels like anxiety, functional disorder, depression, conversion disorder etc etc are, for many people, catastrophic. The medical profession dumps people into their "heart-sink" bucket with these labels and stops bothering to look any further. As you will see from many comments earlier in the thread, people are constantly misdiagnosed with these mental health labels (on the back of no evidence base, medical ignorance of how the the body works and highly questionable logic) when they actually have a physical disorder that doctors were too lazy, incompetent, unwilling, disinterested, or inexperienced to actually correctly diagnose.

There is so much that medics still simply do not know about how the brain and nervous system works. Neurologists have an extremely limited range of tests they can perform. It is only a few decades since multiple sclerosis was thought to be a hysterical mental disorder because at that stage there were no tests capable of picking up the physical changes in the brain. Once MRI came along, everything changed. Medical science still has a long way to go and it is undoubtedly the case that many people written off as having psychological problems will, in the future, be found to have physical diseases once new testing methods and better understanding comes along.

Once a psychiatric or psychological label has been applied, it becomes extremely difficult to get any further investigation, help or treatment for physical symptoms. Not only that, any new symptoms or future health issues are also too often conveniently put down to the psychological cause instead of effort going into properly ruling out physical causes. For high proportions of such people, no psychological therapies have any effect whatsoever - the doctors then simply blame the patients for this lack of any progress. It's crazy and there is no logical or evidence base for this opinion but nevertheless they get away with it. Doctors dismiss patients and simply don't believe them. This may be unpalatable but it is the real experience of countless people.

Many people don't share your confidence in the years of training that therapists have had. So many of us have had experience of truly hopeless and incompetetent mental health practitioners of all sorts, psychiatrists, psychologists and so on. Years of training or practice don't give any assurances of quality or ability, sadly.

I am not trying to undermine mental health conditions as less important than physical ones or to suggest that doctors shouldn't test patients properly for psychiatric or psychological causes of their symptoms. I have suffered with reactive depression for over 5 years (caused by the life changing consequences of coping with my diagnosis of an incurable physical condition) and its truly, truly awful. However, in this blurred area where neuro meets psychiatry, proposing anxiety as a cause of someones symptoms is a bit like a red rag to a bull for these reasons, especially for someone who is struggling to be believed.