How Might Psychiatric Diagnosis Be Different in the Future?
Several systems changes may have to take place before the declining standards of psychiatric diagnosis are reversed. Simply putting an emphasis on allowing people to stay in their homes and adjusting the degree of services brought in to fit their changing clinical conditions will have a pronounced impact on diagnosis. In our present system people are moved from place to place as a result of changes in their level of symptoms. Each place that they go to has its own paperwork requirements around diagnosis. And the different facilities rarely communicate well with each other. So at each stop on the circuit there is a new conceptualization of the patient’s problems and opportunities for a new diagnosis – or misdiagnosis. A new “treatment plan” must be created, complete with new “goals” that the professionals must document for the patient (in truth, severely mentally ill people rarely think in terms of “goals and objectives”- this is another well-intended creation of administrators that may
