Online Depression Information Is Misleading: Analysis of Popular Health Websites

submitted by supersquirrel to publichealth 6 points | 0 comments https://www.additudemag.com/online-depression-information-misleading-circular-reasoning-study/

Psychiatric diagnoses are purely descriptive; yet, none of the organizations directly referred to depression in this way. “The American Psychiatric Association, in the DSM-5, makes explicitly clear that the diagnostic criteria of mental disorders are descriptive in nature because the underlying pathologies are not known,” wrote authors Jani Kajanojaa and Jussi Valtonenb.

Rather, the authors noted that many leading health authorities used circular reasoning — a logical fallacy — when referencing depression. Circular reasoning occurs when a condition (or claim) and its cause (or evidence) are made synonymous. Circular reasoning is also commonly associated with ADHD 2 — a disorder that is highly comorbid with depression. People with ADHD are three times more likely to experience depression compared to those without ADHD.

“While it would be entirely correct to say that the human experiences that the diagnostic criteria describe can feel like an illness, it is different from claiming that an identified external biomedical pathological entity is really causing the symptoms.”

I am not one for semantics mattering too much most of the time, but here it does appear to matter quite a lot.

link to open access paper researchgate.net/…/381382779_A_Descriptive_Diagno…