Ãngel Sánchez-BahÃllo
Mental Health Center of Cartagena, Spain
Title: The problem of diagnosis informed by a psychotherapeutic approach
Biography
Biography: Ãngel Sánchez-BahÃllo
Abstract
Understanding patients is crucial to undertake a therapeutic approach. Psychiatry currently relies mostly on diagnostic categories that rely on a phenomenological and statistical basis with putative biological foundations. ICD and DSM offer a multiplicity of diagnostic categories that tend to reify symptoms into diseases for which we don’t know an etiopathology. Actually, in some cases, we are positive that these diseases do not exist in the terms described by the catalogues. These diagnostic labels are a poor guide to treatment and tend to induce stigma, to dissociate the patient from the origin of his problems and to facilitate the development of an identity around the diagnosis. Formulation, as an alternative to categorical diagnosis, approaches the complexity of the human being and aims to empower him both to understand and to manage his suffering. Formulations are theory laden and acknowledge being so. Different theoretical approaches to the understanding of a patient are discussed, focusing on psychoanalytic and systemic models.