Epic Fail!

Greetings all!

I'm UBER informal, and blogging surely doesn't help, so I will do my best to get back on the professional track starting...oh wait! here's the JAM _R (we love you Jess!) at din din Sunday! k...now!

I enjoyed both articles, but Persons resonated more with me. I've never heard of studying psychological phenomena rather than psychiatric diagnoses, but it certainly makes sense given one point that he states on 1253 (page 2). Persons very clearly outlines the case for schizophrenics who may not have thought disorder, and those without schizophrenia having thought disorder. This immediately triggered my memory for false negatives/positives. I thought, almost instinctively, that it must be worse to have the false negative, because you're walking around with a disease/pathology and not know it. But as I voiced my concerns aloud, my friend very wonderfully suggested that a false positive would be worse psychologically. Come to think of it, he's absolutely right, and summed up both articles very well.

Both Persons and Widiger & Clark suggest that a person is NOT going to miss out on the fact that s/he has symptoms indicative of pathology. For example, thought disorder or a low IQ can be symptomatic of schizophrenia and mental retardation, respectively, but do not necessarily imply either disorder. The inverse, however, is to give someone the label of schizophrenic or mentally retarded, which are stigmatized in any community, when in reality, s/he is void of such markers as thought disorder or may have genetic abnormalities such as Down's Syndrome. Although the person absent of diagnosis is still aware of his/her symptoms, the person with the misdiagnosis may be traumatized by such a label, and further not helped with his/her presenting problem, since a referral to another psychologist may result in treatment for the typical diagnostic problem of those patients.

We must remember, as clinicians, that our patients need care for his/her concerns, not for a cookie cutter solution to get him/her out of our office. Large bins that our clients go in may be a better tool for the average over-burdened employee, but what about the individual? Sure labels are easy to apply, but are they easy to get off?

-R.

As a reference, from our good pal Wikipedia...

*Type I (α) - false positive: reject the null hypothesis when the null hypothesis is true, and
*Type II (β) - false negative: fail to reject the null hypothesis when the null hypothesis is false