Friday
Moderator
That’s about it in terms of similarities, (aside from manipulative behavior, too, I guess,) but that they do have in common.
You can literally take any 2 disorders and find commonality.
This is, in part, because disorders are made up of human traits ...we all have... Taken to the extreme.
- What's "just" a human trait? (All traits have periods of time where they're accentuated, a new parent suffering from anxiety? Usually doesn't have an anxiety disorder. They're just a new parent, and freaked the hell out.)
- What's a trait raised to the level of pathology? (Aka symptom)
- What level is it raised to? (There are spectrums of normal AND spectrums of pathology. ADHD comes with BIG emotions, for example. Bipolar Disorder? HUGE emotions. What's the difference between big & huge? A lot. How does a person know the difference? Experience.)
- WHY is it raised to the level of pathology? (Aka symptom cause. Is it structural? Chemical? Environmental? Etc.)
List goes on.
Psych is a very BABY science. It's still at the level of feeling a forehead for a fever and checking for spots ...going off of descriptions of illness/injury/infection, and running it against what you've already seen & are experienced with... rather than being able to TEST for them. We can't tell the difference between virus, bacteria, parasite, and we don't have individualized medications for them. We're grouping everything by what we can SEE, and then using same same meds on symptoms (fever? This. Itching? That.) rather than targeted medications for specific issues. And -roughly- the same sorts of treatment. It's pure trial and error of what might work. Baby science. Early days. Frontier med.