Misdiagnosis and 'Mental Health'

Put yourself in the shoes of someone who has had repeated head knocks through sport and knows their difficulties are due to those injuries. They seek help, but doctors dismiss their head trauma history and instead diagnose them with a 'mental health' condition like 'bipolar disorder'.

This happens far too often. People with suspected CTE face a medical system that too often doesn't understand brain injury symptoms and reaches for a 'psychiatric' or a 'mental health' label instead — often the path of least resistance, rather than the result of careful thought.

But it is worth stopping to ask why there should be any overlap at all between brain injury and 'mental health'. When you look closely, there are two quite different things going on — and the lazy 'mental health' label collapses both of them into one.

1. The symptoms can be the brain injury itself.

Paranoia, anger, mood swings, impulsivity, personality change — these are not separate psychiatric conditions sitting alongside a brain injury. They can be the injury. Damaged brain tissue produces them directly, in the same way a damaged knee produces a limp.

Think of chest pain: it can come from a heart attack or from indigestion, and it can feel much the same either way — but no competent doctor treats all chest pain alike, because the cause is what matters, not the surface sensation. Paranoia and anger are no different. When they are produced by a brain injury, treating them as a psychiatric condition is like offering an antacid while it is the heart that is in trouble.

2. The distress is a normal response — not a disorder.

It would be perfectly normal to be distressed about having a brain injury. Yet that distress is routinely reframed as a 'mental health condition' in its own right — which means the more understandably upset a person is about being injured and disbelieved, the more 'symptoms' the system finds. Normal distress becomes the evidence. The reaction becomes the diagnosis.

So, all too often, the symptoms of the injury are misread as mental illness, and the ordinary human distress about the injury is misread as mental illness too. Two different things, both ending in the same wrong place.

A concept that treats a healthy response as a symptom, and then treats distress at being disbelieved as further symptoms, is not a well-ordered concept. There is something disordered in the idea of 'mental health' itself.

"The worst thing about probable CTE to me is not the disease, it's not being believed." — Ange Murtha

If this sounds like your experience, you're not alone. There are medical differences between CTE and psychiatric conditions, and you deserve proper evaluation, and proper treatment — by someone who really understands brain injury and who does not conflate it with 'mental health'.

3. A submission

Elisabeth (co-developer of this website with Ange) recently made a submission on the Ministry of Health's Draft Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy 2026–2036. The second of her 5 key points is that 'the strategy does not name brain injury'. Read Elisabeth's submission here.

Concussion, repetitive head impact, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, and sub-concussive injury produce symptoms which may at first seem indistinguishable from many 'mental health' diagnoses. For example, a person with undiagnosed brain injury treated for depression for thirty years deteriorates while:

consuming hundreds of thousands of dollars in mental health services and

suffering in a way that cannot be made legible on a spreadhseet for a financial cost-benefit analysis or a financial audit.

The first bullet point will speak most loudly to government administrators and medical staff who are bound by legislation to make every decision and expenditure legible for a cost centre manager, who can only think and operate in terms of what is legible on a spreadsheet.

The second bullet point will speak to the human beings whose lives are unspeakably affected by decision-making which can only legibilise the

'observable surface' of humans, and is unable and in a sense 'not allowed' to see into the sovereign interior of people - which is the human soul.

But, returning to the here and now- building a proper assessment pathway would be a one-time cost with a multi-decade return, not only financially but also in the sense of beginning to restore our country to true health in its fullest sense.