Mordax et al

thesorority:

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 anorexia nervosa or any other mental disorder.

By definition, to be depressed is not to have some particular bodily feature; by definition, to be depressed is to have one’s experience accurately characterized by a particular set of symptom descriptions. (Likewise, screening tests for depression or other mental disorders are merely tallying up sets of symptoms.)

So a ‘diagnosis’ of bipolar disorder, for example, does not tell us anything new, over and above the presence of particular symptoms defined in a list.

By contrast, a diagnosis of diabetes or hyperthyroidism tells us a great deal more than the set of symptoms which might be experienced by diabetics or those with overactive thyroid glands.

The bottom line is that psychiatric diagnoses are explanatorily empty, and it is for this reason that they are correctly placed in a very different area of the scientific landscape than ‘real’ (Western medical) diagnoses.

They might help clients (and therapists) to understand context, and they might offer statistically relevant indications of potentially useful drug treatments, but they are nothing like the standard diagnoses of Western medicine.