Diagnostics
The diagnosis of mental disorders rests on two pillars: It can be difficult to assign individual symptoms to specific clinical pictures, not least because of the overlapping areas between individual mental disorders. An important “tool” in assigning and summarizing symptom patterns is therefore the so-called “classification manuals” of the World Health Organization and the American Psychiatric Association (ICD or DSM). These establish criteria for making a diagnosis of a particular mental disorder, such as the type and duration of the abnormality or combination with other symptoms.
Such a classification objectifies the diagnosis and helps to differentiate between differential diagnoses.
- An initially performed, conscientious somatic (=physical) examination and questioning serves to exclude physical illnesses as the basis of the mental disorder. Blood tests provide information, for example, about underlying metabolic disorders, while imaging diagnostics (computer or magnetic resonance tomography) reveal infections or shrinking processes in the brain.
- The other essential component of diagnostics is the psychiatric anamnesis (collection of the patient’s medical history with emphasis on the patient’s psyche). This includes the extensive questioning of the patient’s life story, questions about character traits, attitudes and feelings, as well as the observation of the patient’s behavior in conversation with the aim of capturing his or her personality as completely as possible. This type of anamnesis has to be carried out very carefully, takes a lot of time and can sometimes be a great burden for both the examiner and the patient.
Therapy
If the mental disorder is based on a physical illness, the therapy of this illness is usually decisive and can already lead to success. In the therapy of non-physical psychological disorders, various psychotherapeutic and drug therapy methods are used alone or in combination. Which psychotherapeutic methods (e.g. psychoanalysis, behavioral or gestalt therapy) are chosen depends on the type of disorder to be treated and last but not least on the experience and qualification of the therapist.
A large number of specific and highly effective active substances are available for the medicinal therapy of mental disorders, which for the most part relieve the symptoms of the respective disorder by influencing the messenger substance balance in the brain. Unfortunately, these drugs often have significant side effects such as drowsiness, lack of sensation or weight gain, so that drug therapy demands a great deal of consistency from the patients and should definitely be monitored by experienced therapists. Depending on the severity of the symptoms, psychosocial support can help patients to cope with everyday life.
