A diagnosis can change a future.

In Sweden I met a woman who had carried an autism diagnosis for eight years.

Nobody had questioned it. It had shaped how she saw herself, how she explained her own insecurity, how she imagined her future. We sat together, and slowly, what I found underneath was trauma. Severe, buried, never treated… hidden under a label that almost fit. The new understanding changed her treatment, and the treatment changed her future.

I have thought about her ever since. A diagnosis can change a future. So why do we not make sure it changes it for the better?

I am Florina Lungu, a psychiatrist. I grew up in a small town in Romania and trained there, taking my specialty in December 2014. I worked a year at home, then five years in Sweden, and the last five and a half in Denmark, where I am an overlæge, what the system here calls a chief physician. Hospitals and clinics, depression, psychosis, ADHD and most of what adult psychiatry holds. Somewhere along the way I stopped accepting symptoms at face value. Too many of my patients arrived with iron deficiency, vitamin D near the floor, sleep in ruins, old traumas covered and buried, and year after year of new prescriptions that never asked why.

The foundation was crumbling and everyone kept painting the walls.

I am not against medication. I prescribe it, and I have seen it save lives. But I have also seen what happens when we medicate a depleted body and treat the side effects as a new disorder.

So this is the work now. I see patients. I write essays and a column. I am writing a book. And I am building toward a clinic in the Copenhagen area where the whole person is examined before any label is considered.

What I will not do is promise you healing. Nobody can hand you that, and you should be careful with anyone who tries. I offer understanding… and the honest sentence that the work, in the end, is yours. It always was. I have just sat with enough people to know that the work is worth doing.

Warmly,
Florina

Florina Lungu, MD, is a specialist psychiatrist and overlæge (chief physician) licensed in Sweden and Denmark, with particular experience in adult psychiatry, ADHD and psychosis. She trained with the Amen Clinics in brain health and writes a column for Last Week in Denmark.