🌟 NEW PREPRINT: Adolescent self-diagnosis of mental disorders: An interview study of clinicians’ perspectives (N=16)
Concerns over self-diagnosis are increasing, but research is limited. What do clinicians think about this phenomenon, and do they think it impacts therapy?
https://tinyurl.com/4zkz7nyh
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Concerns over self-diagnosis are increasing, but research is limited. What do clinicians think about this phenomenon, and do they think it impacts therapy?
https://tinyurl.com/4zkz7nyh
/1
Comments
Using reflexive thematic analysis, we generated five themes from the data, briefly summarised below
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Clinicians felt that self-diagnosis is motivated by adolescents' fundamental need to understand themselves and articulate their distress to others. Self-diagnosis was seen as a natural process and a not new phenomenon
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'Some of the people that I've met with have been really desperate for somebody to hear them and to listen to them and take them seriously. And in doing that, sometimes there's an idea of: “People will take me more seriously if I have a label”.'
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Clinicians consistently linked the increase in self-diagnosis to a broader societal shift in how mental health is discussed, including online and in schools, meaning this is the language they use to describe their difficulties
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Clinicians felt that a self-diagnosis provides critical information about what the young person’s difficulties are and how they understand themselves, and thus it was inevitably important to and even useful for the therapeutic process
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Clinicians reported that, in most cases, preoccupation with self-diagnosis lessened over time. Validating their experience replaces the initial function of self-diagnosis and the label can then be 'released'
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