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polymathwannabe comments on Open thread, 18-24 August 2014 - Less Wrong
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I'll just link to this and I'm done.
Oh, wow, that's where this uniform protest against making guesses about mental states comes from? It's actually written into their ethical guidelines?
I don't understand this. Is there some obvious or non-obvious reason for psychiatrists not to guess at mental states out loud, beyond the obvious one where people might listen to your opinions?
I don't get it.
If the doctor hasn't personally examined the person in question, any attempt at diagnosis is guesswork and has a great risk of damaging that person's reputation.
If the doctor has personally done the examination, he/she is bound by professional confidentiality.
If the one attempting to diagnose is not a doctor in the first place, he/she has no business speculating on other people's mental health, and there's still risk of damaged reputation.
It is bad for the reputation of psychiatry — and thus, people's willingness to go to psychiatrists when they would benefit from doing so — if psychiatrists use allegations of mental illness as a social or political stigma.
If you believed you might have a sexually transmitted disease, would you go to a doctor of a school that was known for speculating on how poxy or syphilitic various public figures were, as a way of saying those figures were bad and untrustworthy people?