The treatment of mental disorders is an extremely important topic for many people and in some cases will completely improve someone’s life quality. Yet, it is also extremely controversial. Many psychologists debate over how the problem of mental disorder should be explained and treated and even whether it should be treated at all. It is a matter of discussion how we should face this difficult concept and what is the correct way to proceed with the issue.
Some would say that what we categorise as mental disorder is in fact just natural differences in personality, and that to treat it is just to stop someone acting the way they do naturally. If this is the case, it is perhaps wrong to try and help. However, the majority of people follow the medical approach to mental disorder, whereby mental disorders are categorised as if they were a biological disease. This also often uses drugs and other medical procedures to treat the problem. Some psychologists still argue with this, believing that in doing this you are just treating the symptoms of the problem, not the problem itself. They would then probably side with the use of cognitive, behavioural or psychodynamic methods to treat the disorder, whereby a therapist will talk with and carry out activities with the patient in order to stop them from thinking in an irrational way.
Whichever techniques you believe in for the treatment of disorders, there is still the major issue of diagnosis. Before a patient can receive any help or treatment they must first be diagnosed with a problem. This leads to many problems associated with diagnosing patients. Those who diagnose will have their own opinions and experiences that will bias their ability to diagnose professionally and this may mean that diagnoses are invalid and are unreliable, being different across different psychiatrists in the field. This was the basis for Rosenhan’s ground-breaking study into the diagnosis of mental disorders.
The experiment began with people from various walks of life going to psychiatrists and describing symptoms they were experiencing. None of them were in fact experiencing this mental disorder but were acting. The symptoms that they described were common ones of schizophrenia, which led 11 of the 12 psychiatrists to diagnose the patients with this disorder, proving that diagnoses can be invalid since they were tricked so easily by these actors. However, this also showed a distinct lack of unreliability, since one of the patients was diagnosed with manic-depressive psychosis, showing two people could have the same symptoms but be diagnosed with different disorders.
Once the patients were admitted to mental hospitals, they were treated badly by the staff, and when looking at the notes, realised that normal behaviours were seen as abnormal by the staff because they had been labelled as ‘crazy’. For example the staff described their note-taking as a pathological ‘writing behaviour’. The patients were then told to try and persuade the doctors that they were in fact sane and that they could be released and they found that this was extremely hard to do once labelled with the term ‘mental disorder’. Though the staff of the hospital did not realise that the pseudo-patients were in fact sane, many of the other patients did in fact vocalise their suspicions about the sanity of the researchers.
When the results of this study were later published, one training hospital argued that in their own facility the same mistakes would not have occurred. Rosenhan then replied that he would test this. Over the next 3 months, he would send various pseudo-patients to their facility to be diagnosed, and they would have to tell him at the end of this time which ones they had identified as the actors. At the end of the time period, the staff said that out of 193 patients, they had considered 41 to be imposters. He then told them that he had not sent any imposters at all, and that they had wrongly diagnosed all of those patients. These results were even more shocking, since 41 patients had been left untreated when they did in fact need help.
If diagnosis of mental disorders is so difficult and problematic, we must find new ways to make diagnosis more accurate and reliable as we cannot abandon the process altogether. It is important that we improve the process so that those who need treatment have access to it, since in many ways mental disorder can cause just as much harm and distress as a biological disease. This is a very exciting area right now as it has such a massive effect on the lives of all those involved with changes in diagnosis methods taking place all the time.
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