my Diagnosis

If you have been given a mental health diagnosis by a Psychiatrist, Clinical Psychologist or Counselling Psychologist, you might want to find out more about it, or maybe just find out which services can help you in Nottingham and Nottinghamshire.

There’s a lot of information out there, and it can be hard to know if it’s reliable. We talk about some mental health diagnoses on other pages of this website, like depression and the anxiety disorders. This page is a quick guide to some of the other key diagnoses, to help you to get started.

Bipolar Disorder

Bipolar disorder is a condition where someone has ‘manic’ episodes and depressive episodes, when they feel very low and lacking in energy. A manic episode can make you feel excited, irritable, and feel really good about yourself.

You might find you need less sleep than normal, take risks, and find it hard to concentrate.  Sometimes manic and depressive episodes can happen at the same time, or your mood might swing between the two very quickly.

Dissociative disorders

Dissociative disorders are a group of conditions in which someone feels disconnected or detached in some way, to the point that it is causing them difficulty in their daily life.

In depersonalisation/derealisation disorder, the person either feels detached from themselves, or from the world around them.  You might feel like you are not in your body and are watching yourself from a distance, or as though you are watching a movie of reality.

At the other end of the scale, Dissociative identity disorder, or DID, is a condition where someone has sudden and major changes in how they think, feel and act.

They might seem almost like a different person sometimes.  They might even feel like they are a different person to themselves, and not remember anything from before they changed.

MIND, Dissociative disorders:

Hoarding Disorder

People with hoarding disorder collect and keep so many possessions that the place where they live gets cluttered, and can often become unsafe. You might feel an urge to buy new possessions, struggle to throw things away, and have ideas you should keep your possessions because they might be useful, or because it would be very upsetting for you to let them go.

Take a look at this video about hoarding from NHS Lancashire and South Cumbria:

Personality Disorders

Your personality is the way that you normally behave, experience life, and make sense of yourself, other people, events, and situations.

We all have bits of our personality that cause us difficulties sometimes, for example if it is very important to you that people treat each other with respect, you might have found yourself in arguments with your teachers or employers.

Having a personality disorder means that there are parts of your personality that are regularly causing difficulties for you, or for the people around you, in a number of areas of your life. This can make it hard to build and keep close relationships.

People with a personality disorder are likely to have had difficult experiences when they were younger, when their personality was developing. A personality trait that causes difficulties for you as a grown up might have been important and useful to you when you were young. With time and support, you can change learn to manage parts of your personality that are causing you difficulties.

Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is a long-term condition.

When someone with schizophrenia is experiencing psychosis (an acute episode) they might have hallucinations, delusions and confused thoughts. You can find out more about psychosis here.

As well as acute episodes, people with schizophrenia often avoid social contact, lack motivation to do things, and feel disconnected from their emotions, which can mean that they don’t show much emotion.

Many people with Schizophrenia live normal, fulfilling lives when they’re not having an episode, and some will only ever have one episode.