Diagnosis of Dyfunctional Behaviour

1. Describe research into biases in diagnosis (10)

Ford and Widiger investigated whether clinicians may stereotype genders when diagnosing disorders, as it appears that there is a clear tendency to diagnose certain disorders to a particular gender. They investigated this using the self-report method in which they gave various scenarios to health practitioners and asked them to make diagnoses based on the information they were given.  

354 clinical psychologists were randomly selected from the national register and 266 responded to the case histories. The participants were randomly provided with one of nine case histories. The cases were of patients with anti-social personality disorder, histrionic personality disorder or an equal balance of symptoms from both disorders. Each case study was either male, female or sex unspecified, and the psychologists were asked to rate on a 7-point scale the extent to which the patient appeared to have each of the nine disorders. The other disorders on the scale included narcissistic personality disorder and dysthymic which is a form of mild depression.

The results show that females who had anti-social personality disorder were misdiagnosed with histrionic personality disorder 46% of the time showing that there was a clear tendency to diagnose females with HPD even when their case histories showed that they had ASPD. This proves that some practitioners are biased by stereotypical views of genders. Additionally, the sex-unspecified case histories were diagnosed with borderline personality disorder when all patients either had ASPD or HPD suggesting that diagnosis, particularly ASPD and HPD is based on the gender of the patient rather than the symptoms.          

1. Evaluate the reliability of diagnosis of dysfunctional behaviour (15)

Reliability is the extent to which an experiment, test, or measuring procedure produces the same results when the procedure is repeated. When diagnosing dysfunctional behaviour, it is important that the diagnosis is reliable – in this case reliability would be a group of health professionals all coming to the same conclusion based on symptoms therefore all of them agreeing on the disorder that then individual presents.

One way of diagnosing dysfunctional behaviour is using DSM or ICD which categorise dysfunctional behaviour and enable practitioners to identify the disorder and therefore treat it. Many clinicians would use DSM and the ICD tool together to gain better reliability as the DSM takes into consideration many social and environmental factors. A strength of these tools are that they are frequently updated to accommodate new diagnosis. For example, homosexuality was considered as a mental disorder however in today’s society is not viewed as a disorder at all, also new disorders like eating disorders for instance anorexia were not identified until recently. This makes these two classification systems more sophisticated therefore more widely used between clinicians making the diagnosis from one clinician to the next even more reliable. However, some disorders may carry the same symptoms, making a little more difficult to distinguish between the disorders.