Patients can suffer from multiple mental disorders
There are two difficulties in the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness:
- the fairly common occurrence of more than one diagnosis at the same time in the same patient, and
- the similarities and overlapping symptoms of many psychiatric disorders, making it difficult to make a clear distinction or choose appropriate treatment methods.
These difficulties may arise because of inadequate definitions for disorders. We don’t have biological markers for any of these disorders. The criteria used are based on expert consensus and may not reflect true biological boundaries between conditions.
Mental disorders related to multiple genes