Bipolar: Overdiagnosis or Misdiagnosis

When I ask a patient psychiatric or substance use disorders in blood relatives, Bipolar disorder increasingly comes up. I think, "Yeah, right." This is just one of many adverse consequences of the Bipolar overdiagnosis epidemic.

So I was glad to see in JCP I received yesterday:

Psychiatric Diagnoses in Patients Previously Overdiagnosed With Bipolar Disorder (Zimmerman et al J Clin Psychiatry 71:1, January 2010)

However, I will quibble with the terminology: One cannot "over" diagnose a patient. Then it becomes misdiagnosis (which my spell checker recognizes, unlike overdiagnosis). One can certainly overdiagnose 2 or more patients, while one can misdiagnose any number of patients.