Bipolar disorder misdiagnosis: How the label can steer some patients wrong.

By age 11, Kassondra Ola had been prescribed the following psychiatric medications at one point or another: Zoloft, Concerta, Celexa, Lexapro, risperidone, Neurontin, Depakote, Seroquel, lithium, Topamax, Trileptal, Abilify, and Adderall. “What misdiagnosis has done is it’s delayed the diagnosis of important things,” Ola said, “delayed the grieving of important things.” Further, she said, “it’s allowed for underlying conditions to get worse.” Bipolar disorder entered the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1980, replacing the depression subtype of manic depression. “If you’re practicing mental health treatment from a psychopharmacologic perspective, under the FDA, there’s no pill for borderline personality disorder.” For some conditions mistaken for bipolar, psychiatric drugs are not the go-to. Patients with a bipolar diagnosis that didn’t stand up to scrutiny were five times as likely as patients never dubbed bipolar to be rediagnosed with borderline personality disorder. Lynette Nelson, a former casino blackjack manager in Minnesota, said that in her early 20s she was misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder, a label she “went with” for nine years.