Who decides the names of diseases? |
Various doctors. |
But we have general criterions. |
We have the ICD and the DSM, which are international standards for the definition of mental diseases. |
We know that if a person has a certain set of symptoms, we can consult these standards and find the exact name of the disease the person is suffering from. |
As you know, the mind can be a difficult thing to understand. |
For that reason, psychiatrists have publications, and we communicate all the time, sharing our data and our understanding of mental illness. |
We accumulate data and categorize it so that we can diagnose patients as correctly as possible. |
There’s mental illness you don't understand? Not even you? |
To tell you the truth, we don’t understand much of this at all. |
If there has been a successful treatment method for a patient with a certain disease in the past, we can apply that treatment method toward a patient suffering from the same disease in the present. |
Much of this has to do with experience. |
You do this even if you don’t know if a person can be cured? |
Right. |
You can’t tell if a person will be cured. |
We can only try our best to heal and help with our experience from the past. |
That’s usually the case. |
But from the point of view of the patient, knowing if one will become better is very important. |
In fact, the understanding of the mechanisms behind getting better is an area of study of its own. |
I see. It would be so much better if we could understand everything. |