“What we may miss when we assign multiple psychiatric diagnoses to one person”
This article by Mark Ruffalo has been published in Psychology Today. It begins:
“Many patients with whom I meet for the first time tell me that they have been diagnosed with a laundry list of psychiatric disorders. It is not uncommon, for instance, for a patient to tell me that they have ‘MDD, GAD, ADHD, and PTSD.’ When I occasionally review patients’ past records, I find that even formal psychological evaluations conducted by clinical psychologists often list four, five, six (or more!) psychiatric diagnoses.
This practice of diagnosing the patient with multiple psychiatric disorders—what I have elsewhere called polydiagnosis—is a relatively novel trend in psychiatry. As my Tufts colleague Nassir Ghaemi (2018) has pointed out, this practice stems from the lack of a diagnostic hierarchy in psychiatry and from the field’s wholesale adoption of the DSM diagnostic system, which essentially promotes listing as many diagnoses as possible (with a few limited exceptions, such as listing both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder) …”
You can read more from here.
