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by rrsp 292 days ago
Why does psychiatry need to have an ‘equivalent’ of a sprained ankle?

Most people recognise a sprained ankle, at least mild ones, as a self limiting illness. An issue with psychiatric diagnoses is that they are often not taken to be self limiting and often become a large part of a patients self image. While sometimes this can be helpful and help inform treatment it can also be harmful and I have seen this harm first hand in patients I see.

2 comments

If there is no sprained ankle diagnostics and doctors just tell you to ignore not being well: just jump and run around as normal there is nothing seriously wrong.

And doctors only react when you can no longer use your legs for a year, otherwise they must be amputated.

Or would you rather have an earlier disgnostic with instructions to reduce extreme loads and try to take it easy. Let's check again in a week.

That sounds like not the psychologist’s fault. Don’t blame the doctor if their patient makes a sprained ankle their identity.

If someone smokes a lot of cigarettes and gets lung cancer, we don’t blame the doctor for the lung cancer. This shit is the patient’s responsibility.