The diagnosis is an important tool for you and your doctor. Doctors and therapists use a diagnosis to advise you on treatment options and future health risks. Another reason a diagnosis matters is that it tells health insurance companies that you have a condition requiring medical care.

Terms in this set (7)

• culture. a combination of beliefs, customs, practices and social behaviours of a particular group of people.
• language. common language units people.
• religion and spirituality.
• environment and relationship to the land.
• gender.
• media.
• ideology.

There may be times when your friend or family member needs to seek help more urgently, such as if they:

• have harmed themselves and need medical attention.
• are having suicidal feelings, and feel they may act on them.
• are putting themselves or someone else at immediate, serious risk of harm.

If emotional or behavioural problems are significantly disrupting your life, it’s important that you seek professional assistance early. The term ‘mental health problem’ describes a broad range of emotional and behavioural difficulties, which will affect most people at some stage in their lives, including: Anxiety.

Having a diagnosis can give access to various support groups, treatment programmes, and medications that might not have been available previously. Being labelled with a mental health diagnosis might impact how others interact with you.

The amount of information needed helps to determine the amount of time the assessment takes. Typically, a psychiatric evaluation lasts for 30 to 90 minutes. At J. Flowers Health Institute, evaluations take approximately 2 hours to ensure a comprehensive and accurate evaluation.

In this way the answer to the editors’ question is that we should use both in describing the patient’s condition—the syndrome which will direct us to the treatment or other intervention, and the diagnosis as an indication of the direction in which we should search for the causes of the condition and for an …