Train mental healthcare professionals to observe and record rather than judge

Now that would be progress, for people and for mental health professionals.

Psychiatrists are trained to make rapid judgements on a person to label them and their life course. So much of their science is designed to reduce diagnosis to a rapid operational procedure.

The funny thing is it sucks balls. Diagnostic reliability and validilty is bullshit in clinical practice, and that's without the scientific concerns of people like Bental and Boyle.

It isn't surprising though. How do you type a stranger accurately within an hour or a few meetings and some reports from other people?

This is a personalising question...ugh...a made up word but you know what I mean...my bad english...I mean to make personal...anyway...how do you rapidly type a person?

I hope my reader gets what I'm talking about. Psychiatric diagnosis is little different, in practice, from lay social labels and is a construct conceived because of the impact of the public's attitudes and behaviour based on these labels.

Psychiatrists, like people, would be better off recording and observing. This is a process of learning about an individual before making a judgement. It is not a rapid assessment nor a facile operational diagnosis which I am talk about achieving. It is all about one simple thing: mental health professionals need to stop labelling and categorising so they can get on with the real job of listening, observing and understanding.

Then we might have a step forward in mental healthcare.

Sent from my smartphone