10 years ago
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'A Pill for Every Ill'
If there were fewer possible psychiatric diagnoses, would fewer people consider themselves ill? A growing number of health experts suspect that psychiatric care is drifting toward "diagnostic inflation," in which the rate of mental disorders balloons as a result of new diagnoses - and not due to an increasingly troubled population. What's worse is that this process may be fueled by the very document that is supposed to control it.
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This is so true,l know several people that are self diagnosing and are loaded up on pills.They take one to wake up,one to go to sleep,one to stay awake,one for my arthritis,for my knees,for my back,for my anxiety......................the list never ends.Those pills scare the crap out of me and l will not take them,it is the beginning of the end.
This is a main reason why psychiatric diagnosis cannot rely on just a symptom list approach. At a minimum, a psychiatric diagnosis should determine if the person experiences suffering (and to what degree) and/or if they have objective impairment in their functioning due to the reported symptoms. Of course, this is a minimum. Ideally, the reported symptoms should be situated in an understanding of the person's life story.