It&#x27;s not that simple, even for the doctor.  I&#x27;ve had about five doctors tell me that I have ADHD which always led to amphetamine based prescriptions.  That generally helped with the attention issues, which was my biggest concern.<p>The problem is that the mood issues were always just... &quot;me&quot;. It just seemed like an aspect of mild depression that was always manageable. The daily internal dialogue would go: &quot;My mood is absolutely awful right now.  I have zero energy and feel depressed. But, this is just a fleeting feeling that should go away in an hour. I&#x27;ll just deal with it. Coffee should help a bit for now, at least.&quot; In other words, I would swing between moods similar to  bipolar II.<p>Turns out that&#x27;s the wrong way to look at it.  Some major life events caused me to re-evaluate many things, so I took a major vacation by myself without contact to the world to gain a lot more self insight. Eventually that led to me asking my psychiatrist about bipolar&#x2F;schizophrenia as a possible cause of my problems.  (Some article on hacker news on mental health actually led to bringing up the specific questions.)<p>When I brought it up, he even looked at me like I was trying to completely self-diagnose and initially shrugged it off. Technically, yes it&#x27;s self-diagnosis, but it led to a more-correct diagnosis, but only after sending me to a research program that gave me a full psych evaluation. One of the doctors even mentioned multiple times &quot;you&#x27;re the perfect candidate for this study...&quot; Go figure..<p>Mild aside - Similar doubt happens when I ask about lead poisoning as a possible attention&#x2F;mood root. I used to shoot rifles competitively for years without taking care of washing my hands and such, so it&#x27;s not a completely awful theory. Every doctor I brought it up to looked at me like an idiot and would just send me to get a blood test as if that&#x27;s even a valid test.  Still no answer there.<p>(edit - editing)