Are Psychiatric Diagnoses Really Medical Diagnoses?
Under the medical model common to most Western countries, the notion of diagnosis refers to the identification of the nature and cause of a disease, injury or other deviation from normal functioning. Typically, direct physical measurements are undertaken to narrow down the set of possible causes (the differential diagnosis) which could explain the symptoms that have been observed by the physician or reported by the patient. Crucially, this means that a medical diagnosis is not merely a collection of symptoms; a medical diagnosis adds new information to the clinical picture which is not available merely from collecting together any given set of symptoms. It adds new information about causation, treatment, prognosis, complications, and more. In the case of ‘diagnosing’ mental disorders, however, the ‘diagnoses’ are actually defined in terms of the presence or absence of a given set of symptoms. Unlike the case of diabetes, for example, there is no simple blood test for depression or anor
