Are male doctors quick to diagnose mental illness in women?

Readers respond to Dr Sanah Ahsan’s article questioning why women are more likely to receive a mental health diagnosis than men

I am not surprised to hear that women are overdiagnosed with mental illnesses (Are women really more mentally ill than men? As a psychologist, I’m not so sure, 8 March). In my 30s, I developed systemic lupus erythematosus, which went undiagnosed for several years, my symptoms wrongly diagnosed by (male) GPs as stress triggered by a high-powered job. I was prescribed an antidepressant that made me hypomanic, and acquired a further diagnosis of bipolar disorder.

Eventually I found a GP who listened to me, and blood tests picked up antibodies and other diagnostic indicators for lupus. Apparently it’s common for lupus sufferers to overreact to drugs, but over the next few years a succession of (male) psychiatrists continued to insist I had bipolar disorder. I believed them: my mood invariably deteriorated during flare-ups, and when I was well, I felt wonderful.

According to the drug data, the usual drugs for bipolar disorder are contraindicated in people with lupus and associated kidney disease, so I didn’t take them. One psychiatrist suggested that I had self-diagnosed lupus as an excuse to refuse treatment and another wanted to hospitalise me “to find the right drug”. Didn’t they read my medical notes, I wondered, or question why I was prescribed steroids?

For more than a decade I believed I was an impossible case until I saw a female psychiatrist who, instead of relying on notes by previous psychiatrists, as her predecessors had done, took a full history. She consulted her (female) colleagues and concluded that I did not meet the criteria for bipolar disorder. Since then, I have never felt “bipolar” again or worried that I wasn’t helping myself by having a demanding job.

Would I have been so readily diagnosed as mentally ill if I had been male? I am white, middle-class and educated. What hope is there for those who aren’t so privileged?

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https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/mar/10/are-male-doctors-quick-to-diagnose-mental-illness-in-women

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