The use of diagnosis

Diagnosis is a tool doctors use when he or she has to find out which disease you are suffering from. For example, if you presented with some symptoms that could indicate signs of depression, the doctor will base on his or her own examinations and your symptoms to make a diagnosis which is used to find the answers to the following questions:

• Do you suffer from depression or not?
• If the answer is yes, what type of depression – mild, moderate or severe?
• Are you suffering from anything else - physical disease, anxiety, abuse, psychosis?
• What will the course of the disease be - is there any risk of suicide? Depression always needs to be treated! Do you perhaps need to be admitted?
• Which treatment is the best in this case - medicine and/or psychotherapy? Or electroconvulsive therapy?
• What complications can occur - what side-effects are there? Is there any risk of abuse?
• Can relapses and new depressive episodes be prevented - do you need to take preventive medicine for a long time??

Diagnoses are also a prerequisite for being able to do research and obtain new knowledge. By using diagnoses we can compare a group of patients with another group of patients and see which one of the treatments is the best. By following up on patients who had the same diagnosis we obtain new knowledge about:

• the cause of the disease
• the course of the disease
• possible complications
• which treatment is the best
• how the disease can be prevented