Diagnosis, psychiatry and neurology: the case of Huntington Disease.

Although Huntington Disease (HD) is recognized as a neurological condition, it has a number of psychiatric effects, with recent studies suggesting that these effects can appear years prior to the telltale neurological symptoms. This trajectory has, in part, led to the misdiagnosis of HD as a psychiatric illness, as explicated in numerous case studies. This paper utilizes HD as a case study to investigate the social consequences of diagnosis by highlighting the tensions and ambiguities between neurology and psychiatry, while also discussing the difficulties that HD creates for psychiatry's diagnostic schema. Findings are based on 30 in-depth interviews conducted with both individuals with HD and informal caregivers (e.g., spouses) in British Columbia, Canada. The findings address numerous instances of misdiagnosis and the resulting negative impacts for individual health and well-being. The findings are further discussed in relation to the work of Bakhtin and Latour, with suggestions presented to ameliorate such misdiagnoses.