{"id":4257,"date":"2024-08-26T10:00:38","date_gmt":"2024-08-26T15:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cchrstl.org\/wordpress\/?p=4257"},"modified":"2024-08-25T10:08:28","modified_gmt":"2024-08-25T15:08:28","slug":"psychiatric-diagnosis-is-meaningless","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cchrstl.org\/wordpress\/2024\/08\/26\/psychiatric-diagnosis-is-meaningless\/","title":{"rendered":"Psychiatric Diagnosis is Meaningless"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The most recent psychiatric billing bible, providing the official diagnoses that can be used for insurance reimbursements, is The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders<\/a><\/em> (DSM-5-TR, Text Revision of 2022).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Diagnostic categories within the DSM are heterogeneous. Diagnostic heterogeneity is the idea that diagnostic labels can capture different syndromes with different causes under the same heading.
[Heterogeneous = Made up of elements that are not alike.]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example, there are almost 24,000 possible combinations of symptoms for panic disorder in DSM-5, making it extremely difficult to assign any specific cause to the condition; and thus making it extremely difficult to confidently recommend any particular treatment. Two different people could receive the same diagnosis without sharing any common symptoms, meaning that the category “Panic Disorder” is scientifically meaningless.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can see that such diagnostic heterogeneity is problematic for both research and clinical practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We refer to the research paper “Heterogeneity in psychiatric diagnostic classification<\/a>“, by Allsopp<\/a>, Read, Corcoran, and Kinderman (published 3 July 2019).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The study concludes that psychiatric diagnoses are scientifically worthless<\/a> as tools to identify discrete mental health disorders. Lead researcher Dr. Kate Allsopp, University of Liverpool, said: “Although diagnostic labels create the illusion of an explanation they are scientifically meaningless and can create stigma and prejudice.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Psychiatrists excuse this lack of rigor by saying it allows for “clinical judgment.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In point of fact, such “judgment” is worthless, as it relies upon opinions. What is the alternative? Since there are no clinical tests for these fraudulent psychiatric diagnoses, the correct action on a mentally disturbed person is a full searching clinical examination by a competent non-psychiatric health care practitioner, in order to find and treat any undiagnosed and untreated real medical conditions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Psychiatric diagnoses are scientifically worthless\u00a0as tools to identify discrete mental health disorders. Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Psychiatric diagnoses are scientifically worthless\u00a0as tools to identify discrete mental health disorders.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[19,61],"class_list":["post-4257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-muddy-river-newsletter","tag-dsm","tag-misdiagnosis"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6NMpC-16F","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cchrstl.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cchrstl.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cchrstl.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cchrstl.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cchrstl.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4257"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cchrstl.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4257\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cchrstl.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cchrstl.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cchrstl.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}