The use of diagnosis

Diagnosis is a process that allows the doctor to find out which disease you are suffering from. If, for example, you present with some symptoms that could be indicative of depression, the doctor will, on the basis of your symptoms and his or her own examinations, try to answer 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 any other condition like physical disease, anxiety, substance abuse, or psychosis?
• What will the course of the disease be? Is there any risk of suicide? Do you need to be hospitalized?
• Which treatment is the best in your case: medicine and/or psychotherapy, or electroshock therapy?
• Which complications can occur, for example, side-effects from the medicines and/or substance abuse?
• Can relapses and new depressions be prevented? Do you need to take preventive medicine for a long time??

Diagnoses are also a prerequisite for one to be able to do research and obtain new knowledge. By using diagnoses we can compare groups of patients and see which one of the treatments is the best. By following patients who have 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