Mental afflictions rarely have a clear A or B diagnosis. Comorbidity is common, in that you have a bit of A, some B and flavors of C. One explanation is that it

Mental afflictions rarely have a clear A or B diagnosis. Comorbidity is common, in that you have a bit of A, some B and flavors of C. One explanation is that it's an underlying physiological issue: subtle imbalances in brain chemistry with an array of manifestations. We try to figure out what the issues are based on how the software fails to run when in fact there's a HW issue. Look up comorbity of either of those and depression or sleep disorders etc. Sometimes it's a clear cut this or that but simply because it helps doctors diagnose by pattern matching and we can't actually diagnose neurology properly. We don't have a probe we can use to measure chemical and electrical brain properties, and we don't know how to interpret them even when we can (there are things like fMRI but they say little). So instead we develop a taxonomy of afflictions which tries to be (and doctors act as if it is) made up of distinct entries. If you look into the DSM V (or IV?) manual of disorders you'll see that comorbidities are listed and data shows they're quite common. In my experience most doctors try to slap a diagnosis and treat it without thinking about the non-linear interactions between these issues, caused by the underlying hardware.