Psychiatry Is Still Stuck in Freud ’s Era. Big Data Can Revolutionize How We Care for Patients

I have a problem. I am a psychiatrist in the 21st century and yet I still evaluate patients the way Freud did a century ago: I sit with a patient and, by carefully observing how and what they say, I expect them to tell me what’s wrong. The problem isn’t that I speak with and listen to my patients. Every doctor of every speciality does that. Rather, my problem is that I never measure the data I think are most important to my treatment of psychiatric diseases. Consider how I evaluate a patient for psychosis in the emergency room. When I speak with them, I want to know what their life is like—what’s their day like? What’s on their mind? How social are they? How’s their sleep? These data depend on my patient’s ability to remember, accurately report, make sense of, and tell me about their experience—and further, my treatments depend on my own ability to listen to and make sense of what I’m hearing. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] While we speak, I look for things like rapid or disorganized speech, somewhat incongruent facial expressions, or even recurrent ideas that might help me guage their mind’s function. I ask a series of finely-honed questions to poke and prod at their mind, creating a trove of essential clinical data. But my problem is that the only tool I use to gather and understand these data is my own brain. In other words, I leave the vast majority of that data unrecorded, unanalyzed and untapped. ...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: news