Are you diagnosed with multiple mental illnesses?

I see so many people around here who have multiple comorbidities with their primary diagnosis. Hell, I don’t even know if there is a primary diagnosis. It just seems like people have a laundry list of disorders.

I know that in my “field” (being bipolar), there are a lot of people with several different diagnoses. There seems to be some confusion as different doctors at different times will give some slightly different diagnosis.

I wonder if this is at all helpful. I know that everything from Anorexia to OCD, and a bunch of things in between (or after O, but I don’t remember for sure), share the same mutation on one of the genes associated with those disorders. It’s too soon to say, but it could be possible, genetically speaking, that all the mental disorders are pretty much variants of the same thing. If that were the case, then perhaps it almost wouldn’t matter what you were diagnosed as.

A lot of the same meds are used for many of these disorders. In bipolar disorder, they know there’s one thing (Lithium) that pretty much always works, but after that, they have no idea which drug to go to. Different drugs work with different people, and so every patient is an experiment. I know people who have gone through over a dozen different meds. Over the time they try these meds, they also get different diagnoses.

To the question:
Do you have multiple diagnoses? If so, what are they? What do you think all these diagnoses mean? Do they make a difference in treatment, or is it just an excuse for a doctor to prescribe a different med? And for you—what story do you tell yourself to explain it all?