Diagnosis Disorder Drama

In Sri Lanka, it’s quite common that after a first session with a counsellor/psychologist, you’ll leave the practice with a “diagnosis”. That might feel reassuring but in many cases it doesn’t say much. 

Words - Dr Marcel De Roos

And even a questionnaire “test” where you are diagnosed as for example “Borderline” might come across as accurate (it’s often given with percentages), but it’s only correlated with symptoms (whether you have several symptoms or not). These questionnaires are useless because they are based on the DSM5 and lack the layeredness and complexity of the different aspects of a mental illness. What is wrong with this approach is that mental disorders are presented as constructs that can be measured in a similar way as medical illnesses. In the medical model there are physical symptoms that can be corroborated with scans, lab tests, blood pressure, etc. A mental illness (or “disorder”) is just a handful of arbitrary symptoms (with a huge variability!) with no biomarkers to substantiate it.