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Ronald W. Pies's avatar

Kudos for this lucid article, Awais! In my view, one of the most important sections is this excerpt:

"It is often said that psychiatric diagnoses don’t explain anything, though this is not quite true. They do offer a limited form of explanation, namely that of pattern recognition and matching. When a diagnosis is made, the clinician is conveying to the patient that their presentation matches this well-recognised pattern of symptoms, and not these other patterns that could conceivably apply. Based on that, we can link the person’s presentation with existing medical knowledge and use treatments that have been studied for that pattern. This is why accurate diagnoses of conditions such as autism and ADHD can offer powerful explanations for patients and lead them to look at their lives in a new light, even though the causes and mechanisms remain unknown."

This is precisely the point Dr. Mark Ruffalo have been making in our numerous debates with two Finnish colleagues, published in Psychiatric Times. For example, we wrote:

"...when we provide the patient with a psychiatric diagnosis, we are simply hypothesizing the existence of a condition that “best makes sense” of the patient’s presenting signs and symptoms. This is very close to what philosophers of science call “inference to the best explanation.” In so doing, we are not making any metaphysical claims, or reifying the condition by positing some essence, substance, or thing residing inside the patient—akin to, say, a burst appendix."

https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/no-psychiatric-diagnoses-do-not-reflect-circular-logic

Thanks again for your efforts in bringing these ideas to a wide, general audience.

Regards,

Ron

Ronald W. Pies MD

Also see: https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/our-closing-argument-in-defense-of-psychiatric-diagnosis

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Kathleen Weber's avatar

I encourage readers to read the entire article on Psyche. For reasons unclear to me, I got five times more out of the complete article than I got out of the extract.

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