The End Of Symptomatic Psychiatry?

Here’s a great analogy from the 2014 OPEN MINDS Technology & Informatics Institute:

A patient walks into the emergency room with racing pulse and chest pain, fearing a heart attack. The ER physician will think of multiple causes for the patient’s chest pain (e.g. heartburn or panic attack), but will still order an EKG and cardiac enzymes instead of guessing based on the patient’s symptoms. It’s a fairly simple and scientific model to reach a diagnosis and treatment plan in emergency medicine. But those same tools have not been available to mental health professionals, who . . .