Overdiagnosis in Psychiatry Quotes

“Psychiatric diagnosis is at best a common language, and current categories should not be treated as “real.”
― Joel Paris, Overdiagnosis in Psychiatry: How Modern Psychiatry Lost Its Way While Creating a Diagnosis for Almost All of Life's Misfortunes

“Diagnostic fads simply relabel patients that psychiatrists have always seen.”
― Joel Paris, Overdiagnosis in Psychiatry: How Modern Psychiatry Lost Its Way While Creating a Diagnosis for Almost All of Life's Misfortunes

“Psychiatrists have enough work to do without expanding the boundaries of the disorders into the world of the “worried well” or of people going through a “bad patch.”
― Joel Paris, Overdiagnosis in Psychiatry: How Modern Psychiatry Lost Its Way While Creating a Diagnosis for Almost All of Life's Misfortunes

“For now, it would be a better bet to retain diagnostic categories in psychiatry but to make assessment more nuanced by adding transdiagnostic measures.”
― Joel Paris, Overdiagnosis in Psychiatry: How Modern Psychiatry Lost Its Way While Creating a Diagnosis for Almost All of Life's Misfortunes

“Transdiagnostic approaches are one way of avoiding a process of differential diagnosis that assumes a specificity that does not exist.”
― Joel Paris, Overdiagnosis in Psychiatry: How Modern Psychiatry Lost Its Way While Creating a Diagnosis for Almost All of Life's Misfortunes

“the absence of clear boundaries between schizophrenia and bipolar disorders has led some clinicians to prefer the term “psychosis,”
― Joel Paris, Overdiagnosis in Psychiatry: How Modern Psychiatry Lost Its Way While Creating a Diagnosis for Almost All of Life's Misfortunes

“The good news about Cochrane is that most of their conclusions are conservative. Even when data is sufficient for meta-analyses, they often hold back on making recommendations.”
― Joel Paris, Overdiagnosis in Psychiatry: How Modern Psychiatry Lost Its Way While Creating a Diagnosis for Almost All of Life's Misfortunes

“One should never change one’s practice based on a single journal article.”
― Joel Paris, Overdiagnosis in Psychiatry: How Modern Psychiatry Lost Its Way While Creating a Diagnosis for Almost All of Life's Misfortunes

“treatment based on drugs alone allows patients to take a passive role toward their treatment.”
― Joel Paris, Overdiagnosis in Psychiatry: How Modern Psychiatry Lost Its Way While Creating a Diagnosis for Almost All of Life's Misfortunes

“Ultimately, the concept of normality is a philosophical issue. If you think life should be “better than well,” you will seek to fix every problem by considering it to be a treatable medical condition. If, on the other hand, you accept that life is difficult at best, and that living presents continuous challenges, you are more likely to accept life’s inevitable vicissitudes. This is not to say that we should passively accept unnecessary suffering, or that medicine has not contributed an enormous amount to the length and quality of all our lives. But overdiagnosis, cutting across normality, over-stretches these principles to a breaking point. Life does not need to be perfect, or even consistently happy, but just good enough to make it worthwhile.”
― Joel Paris, Overdiagnosis in Psychiatry: How Modern Psychiatry Lost Its Way While Creating a Diagnosis for Almost All of Life's Misfortunes