Diagnosis

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  • Created by: bthnyrose
  • Created on: 09-04-16 14:33

Diagnosis

Advantages

  • Can allocate treatment after making prognosis
  • The introduction of diagnostic manuals has increased reliability of diagnosis over the year even though the manuals are not without flaws.
  • Issues with the spectrum are trying to be dealt with - Disorder spectrum, co morbidity tries to tackle all issues of the patient
  • If explained thoroughly - Can create sense in a confusing world of a mental health patient
  • Getting diagnosis is a 'step forward'
  • Can you start treatment/help/therapy without a diagnosis? Where would you start?
  • Patients can seek out more information by themselves and find comfort in others with the disorder - Find similarities and differences
  • If the patient goes between doctors, they can continue on the treatments and have knowledge of what the patient suffers from

Disadvantages

  • Only classify's on basis of symptoms
  • Look the same on the surface but have different causes - Require different forms of treatment
  • Just re-description rather than explanation - collective terms for defining symptoms
  • Can be stigmatising and harmful -  gives label and adopts 'sick role' > may delay recovery
  • Discrete entities - either diagnosed or you're not
  • May  be dimensional rather than discrete > May just be extreme cases of normal behaviour
  • Cut off point is arbitrary
  • Different sections but co-morbidity causes complications
  • Often diagnosed with two or more >79% of those diagnosed with have experienced another disorder - leads to hybrid disorders (disorders that contain elements of a number of different disorders)
  • Disorder spectrum -Higher order categorical class of symptoms
  • Mixed-anxiety-depressive disorder - Shows just how much of a larger spectrum there is than diagnosis criteria
  • 'Hodgepodge state' - Frances & Widiger 2012 - Some short term, others life-long, some reflect misery, some bad behaviour, some rare, some extreme normal behaviour, some infancy, some old age, some affect personality, some affect social and personal states - How can we define??
  • Rosenberg > All but one diagnosed with schizophrenia - Shows just how easy it is to get diagnosis even when faking it and how much harm psychiatry can do
  • The DSM-IV manual does not include etiology but only symptoms. Sometimes patients have symptoms that relate to different psychological disorders so it can be difficult to make a valid diagnosis

Evaluation

A diagnosis can be the starting steps of recovery and treatment and make the patient feels less confused and scared. However, the large spectrum and confusing criteria shows how little we know about defining mental health and that diagnosis may actually do more harm than good.

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