Doctors ‘overdiagnosing’ mental health conditions, says Streeting
Health Secretary Wes Streeting has said doctors are “overdiagnosing” mental health conditions.
Asked whether he thought this was a problem, he said: “I want to follow the evidence and I agree with that point about overdiagnosis.”
It's quite a well known problem. Many doctors suffer from malingerphobia, a morbid fear of malingerers. Too often, their reaction to a suspected malingerer is to slap on a possible mental diagnosis and refer them to the psychiatric bods, merely to get the supposed malingerer out of the surgery.
Unfortunately, malingerphobia leads to exactly this problem, the “overdiagnosing” of mental health conditions. There has been a case where someone applying for the job of GP receptionist was mistakenly identified as a malingerer, diagnosed as a bit bonkers and shoved off for psychiatric assessment.
Sadly, the error was never identified and the would-be receptionist never worked again.
4 comments:
Clearly we need another QUANGO (NHS England GP perhaps?) to use AI to establish a suitable ration of approved mental health diagnoses per GP practice.
[sarcasm]
DJ - it may be sarcasm, but presumably AI could have a kind of rationing role - NutterGPT - something like that.
A couple of days ago I saw a news story about some senior civil servant who had been sacked for holding 3 different jobs in the Civil Service. Working from home, obviously, and drawing 3 salaries.
That would cause problems if you wanted to be signed off sick. You'd need to register with 3 different doctors. Then you'd better hope that the incompetent lazy civil servants hadn't worked out a way of centralising medical records.
Sam - I wondered how that was achieved, but you must be right about signing off sick, only possible if medical records aren't centralised. Ours don't seem to be.
Post a Comment