Failure to make the correct diagnosis, far from being unique to psychiatry, is all too common in other medical specialties

I have repeatedly made an issue of how psychiatrists miss the diagnosis of multiple personality, and of how they overdiagnose other mental disorders, which are more vaguely defined than multiple personality.

However, to be fair to psychiatry, it must be said that misdiagnosis is a problem with medical diagnosis in general:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/misdiagnosis-is-more-common-than-drug-errors-or-wrong-site-surgery/2013/05/03/5d71a374-9af4-11e2-a941-a19bce7af755_story.html

And people with multiple personality are not the only ones who don’t tell their therapists the whole truth. It is a common problem, for a number of reasons:

http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2008/02/06/10-common-reasons-to-lie-to-your-therapist/

However, there are two additional difficulties in the diagnosis of multiple personality: First, the doctor has probably never learned how to make this diagnosis. Second, the patient is not providing all pertinent information because of the host identity’s amnesia for the comings and goings of the other identities, and the alternate identity’s belief that they are another person and not an alternate identity.