Question

How then can we reconcile the problems with assessment and diagnosis that are presented by Conrad &Stults, Matthew, and Neighbors and colleagues? Should we discard assessment and diagnoses as fundamentally flawed methods and tools? Should we (the public) press mental health professionals to be clearer about the limits and bias that appear to exist in assessment and diagnosis? Should we embrace assessment and diagnosis as our best tools for understanding mental health conditions, regardless of their flaws, since there is unlikely to be a perfect method.

Your post is a a 400 - 650 word brief essay in which you state your perspective (thesis) and use the assigned literature to support your argument. You may also draw upon other source though you must provide an appropriate citation and reference for any work you include that is not part of the posted readings.

Answer 1

Answer:

Introduction:

The assessment and diagnosis of mental health disorders is ambiguous, inconsistent and negatively biased frustrating efforts to identify underlying etiologies and appropriate intervention. New tools are essential to enable research progress.

Across the domains of clinical practice and research, the assessment and diagnosis of mental health disorders is carried out using questionnaires and interviews that ask about the presence, severity, frequency and duration of a broad range of psychiatric symptoms. The symptoms asked about in these assessment tools are based on well-established classification systems, such as the DSM-5 or ICD-11, where predefined patterns of symptom criteria have been grouped together and designated as specific mental health disorders.

Abstract

According to The World Health Organization (WHO) mental health is “a state of wellbeing in which the individual realizes his or her own abilities, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to his or her community”. In keeping with this definition any assessment of mental health should ideally reflect not just negative symptoms, but also the presence of mental assets and abilities.

However, the medical heritage of mental health assessment means that existing tools don’t readily assess wellbeing but instead focus on negative symptoms and dysfunction. Furthermore, symptoms are often assessed in a binary manner, asking simply about their presence or absence, rather than on a spectrum or scale. This one-sided perspective presents a challenge to understanding the borders between “normal” mental health and clinical disorder, especially as many “symptoms” such as sadness, anxiety and risk-taking also fall within the spectrum of normal mental functioning. Understanding this distinction is necessary not only to prevent false positives in diagnosis, a label that can be unduly associated with stigma, but also to ensure that people receive appropriate treatment.

Addressing these challenges

Addressing these challenges requires, as a first step, a more standardized, disorder agnostic mental health profiling that encompasses the spectrum of both symptoms and mental assets and abilities. Taking these requirements into consideration, we have developed an online assessment tool called the Mental Health Quotient (MHQ). This new tool isn’t tied to a disorder-based classification system but instead takes a disorder-agnostic approach to include all semantically distinct symptom categories across all disorders to provide a complete and standardized profile, and considers both symptoms and the spectrum of assets and abilities .

The tool has multiple research and clinical applications but one of our aims is to use it to obtain a global assessment of population mental health and wellbeing to uncover different risk and protective factors. In doing so, we hope to be able to develop a map of the mental health status of our planet and to support the development of interventions and policies that can improve the lives and wellbeing of all people, and not just of those with disorder or dysfunction. Stay tuned for more on this exciting new initiative in the near future.

References:

[1] https://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/directors/thomas-insel/blog/2013/transforming-diagnosis.shtml

[2] Maj, M. (2005). ‘Psychiatric comorbidity’: an artefact of current diagnostic systems? British Journal of Psychiatry 186(3), 182-184. doi: 10.1192/bjp.186.3.182.

The mental health professional to be cleared about limits and bias that appear to exist in assessment and diagnosis

• · In 2001, then–Surgeon General David Satcher issued the report Race, Culture, and Ethnicity and Mental Health,1 in which he convincingly documented disparities in access and treatment that leave too many minority individuals untreated or improperly treated.Racial and ethnic disparities to be considered.
• · mental health program administrators make unwarranted judgments about people on the basis of race or ethnicity.
• · Disparities persist after differences in socioeconomic status, region of residence, and other sociodemographic factors are controlled.
• Health insurance coverage facilitates treatment seeking, and widening the scope of coverage would benefit members of minority groups disproportionately. Investigators have found, however, that despite having lower incomes, minority individuals exhibit a less active response than Whites to reductions in the cost of mental health treatment.
• Bias can be found in differential degrees of tolerance

References

Mental Health: Culture, Race, and Ethnicity—A Supplement to Mental Health: A Report of the Surgeon General. Rockville, Md: US Dept of Health and Human Services; 2001.)

LIMITATIONS

• Any decisions made as a result of the test scores become the responsibility of the administering psychologist or others who access the information. Two psychologists may interpret the results differently and take different courses of action
• Decisions made in a testing situation are not always the same actions people would take when faced with the situation in reality-uncertainty of measurements.
• changes in psychological theories and advancements in technology, psychological tests only remain relevant for a time. Social or cultural changes can lead to test items becoming obsolete, -changing circumstances.

References

· Oxford University Press: Psychological Tests -- What Are They and Why Do We Need Them?

· A Guide to Psychology and its Practice: Psychological Testing ).