Getting the Personal Perspective Into View

摘要

There is A long-standing concern that psychiatrists have the task of fitting a square peg into a round hole: the empirical generalizations upon which diagnoses are made have seemed too many to overlook something essential about the individual person who is the subject of the diagnosis. This concern prompted a World Psychiatric Association (WPA) workgroup to suggest that a personalized component should be added to patients' diagnostic assessment (IDGA Workgroup 2003). One might have the following worry about the WPA workgroup's suggestion: if this personalized component is merely tagged on to the existing diagnostic framework, and diagnoses still rest primarily on empirical generalizations, which are left untouched by this added personalized component, then it is far from clear that anything has really been gained by the addition of the personalized component.