Are recipients of DSM diagnoses immune from the Forer Effect

The Forer Effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forer_effect

"the observation that individuals will give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically for them, but are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people."

It's typically reserved for criticisms of typology, like the MBTI ("I'm an INTP! WOO!!!!111") but does it apply to the same degree to traditional psychiatry as well?

Has anyone here been diagnosed by a psych and then self-identified with that diagnosis, only to find out later it was wrong? (Or maybe convinced themselves it was wrong).

I have. Repeatedly. Bipolar, schizoaffective, ADHD, PTSD, depression. (Un)fortunately I often self-identified long enough to take prescribed meds for these conditions, which was long before I discovered Dabrowski's Positive Disintegration and developed any sort of philosophical sense.

So is this common or am I a formless sponge in pathological need of a label?

Pinky+Brain wrote: but does it apply to the same degree to traditional psychiatry as well?

Here is the first thing I thought of,


"The process of internalizing and living a psychiatric “disorder” is an identity crisis. It is the breaking of one’s identity. Some also refer to this as a “spoiled identity”, and childhood abuse or other forms of domestic violence make people particularly susceptible to this process. Of course, it is often those whose Sense of Self has already been battered to a pulp that will land on the doorstep of the psychiatrist seeking relief from that programmed and internalized hell, only to be handed more of the same.

For example, when you first are labeled with a “serious mental illness”, you might have a strong sense of yourself, and find the label preposterous as an explanation for your suffering, but more often than not, you will be feeling so lost and alone and terrified that you decide (probably unconsciously) to allow the deconstruction and reconstruction of your identity in light of this dramatic and somewhat compelling new information. "

Read more http://web.archive.org/web/201206070109 ... press.com/

It happened to me, I fell for the broken brain serotonin scam entirely .

I think that the psychiatrist should be as neutral as possible.

Now someone self-diagnosing or trying to diagnose a friend or partner will surely be victim of it.

I think if a psychiatrist is too much specialized or superficial he may do it also.

I think some psychiatrist for instance may look for a diagnoses like bipolar disorder, instead of looking for borderline PD.

Yes! I was misdiagnosed with depression, and so that's what I thought I had. It made me think for years that if I just hold on, the depression might go away like it often does to people who actually have depression.

It would have helped a lot to have known back then that my condition was lifelong, and it would have especially helped when they put me on SSRIs and gave me psychotic mania. Thanks, medical system!

By the way, it seems to me that the Forer effect applies strongly to astrology, which is also how I would describe the MBTI (wooo INTP tooo!).

Copy_Cat wrote:Read more http://web.archive.org/web/201206070109 ... press.com/

It happened to me, I fell for the broken brain serotonin scam entirely.

This. Thanks for this.

And I'm glad I'm not alone. Do you think you or the psych had more of a hand in it? And how long did it take you to realize it wasn't correct?

creative_nothing wrote:I think some psychiatrist for instance may look for a diagnoses like bipolar disorder, instead of looking for borderline PD.

What causes this? My bipolar (1st), PTSD, and schizoaffective (comorbid) dx were made 2 months apart. Mostly I'm curious about what I might have presented that they picked up on. What's going through the mind of the psych?

sixprime wrote:By the way, it seems to me that the Forer effect applies strongly to astrology, which is also how I would describe the MBTI (wooo INTP tooo!).

I'd agree with your assessment of the MBTI because it's moved too far away from Jung. Synchronicity is still a good concept though.

Misc thought on this topic -

Personally I am very doubtful that any of us is entirely immune from the Forer effect.

There is how we perceive ourselves, but the harder part is understanding how others perceive us. The later depends on how well they know us, and the really difficult part ... our willingness to hear their perceptions. It's difficult because what they perceive can feel critical, hurtful, etc., when it doesn't match our self-perception.