On the more personal question of what to do here to get the best treatment:
You care more about your condition than any medic, and so are motivated to spend more time on it. However, a general practitioner will have much more experience than you in diagnosing and treating mental health issues in the general population, and a specialist in mental health will know more about their area specifically than you can realistically hope to. (Unless you have a very rare condition, have the background chops to be a doctor, and put in an awful lot of work—which some people do.)
My guess is that you can almost certainly learn enough to be very helpful in decision-making about your condition. I wouldn’t bother with the primary literature though—go for Cochrane Reviews and NICE Guidelines (here’s the ones for mental health), and recent textbooks.
(NICE is a UK health body that basically takes the sort of information you get from Cochrane Reviews about what works and does some clever sums to work out what makes sense to do in yielding the highest number of QALYs given a fixed budget for healthcare.)
It’s not always an easy ride—some clinicians have a morbid fear of patients who have ‘consulted Dr Google’ - and not without good reason.
But if you go along seeing yourself as an informed patient trying to engage in shared decision-making, most are happy about it in my experience. (Though my experience is limited to the UK.) If they’re threatened by you mentioning this sort of evidence, I’d take it as a clear sign to change (if you possibly can).
It also puts you right on the sharp end of the distinction between what’s true of a population and what’s true for you.
My guess is that you can almost certainly learn enough to be very helpful in decision-making about your condition.
“Helpful in decision-making” is a curious way of speaking about mental health. In it’s core mental health is about changing what the patient does and not about the doctor.
For a lot of mental health issues it matters whether a patient feels agency.
My guess is that you can almost certainly learn enough to be very helpful in decision-making about your condition. I wouldn’t bother with the primary literature though
Don’t underrate primary literature. Reading it can help you to build understanding of what the disease is about. There are a lot of details that get stripped out in reviews.
“Helpful in decision-making” is a curious way of speaking about mental health.
For clarity, I meant “learn enough to be very helpful to you in your decision-making about your condition”, rather than useful to the doctor. (Which is not to say that it might not also be helpful to the doctor.)
For a lot of mental health issues it matters whether a patient feels agency.
Yes, absolutely—so for mental health issues it can be particularly helpful to learn enough about your situation and possible interventions so that you can be more involved in the decisions about them, rather than the locus of control lying with the clinician.
On the more personal question of what to do here to get the best treatment:
You care more about your condition than any medic, and so are motivated to spend more time on it. However, a general practitioner will have much more experience than you in diagnosing and treating mental health issues in the general population, and a specialist in mental health will know more about their area specifically than you can realistically hope to. (Unless you have a very rare condition, have the background chops to be a doctor, and put in an awful lot of work—which some people do.)
My guess is that you can almost certainly learn enough to be very helpful in decision-making about your condition. I wouldn’t bother with the primary literature though—go for Cochrane Reviews and NICE Guidelines (here’s the ones for mental health), and recent textbooks.
(NICE is a UK health body that basically takes the sort of information you get from Cochrane Reviews about what works and does some clever sums to work out what makes sense to do in yielding the highest number of QALYs given a fixed budget for healthcare.)
It’s not always an easy ride—some clinicians have a morbid fear of patients who have ‘consulted Dr Google’ - and not without good reason.
But if you go along seeing yourself as an informed patient trying to engage in shared decision-making, most are happy about it in my experience. (Though my experience is limited to the UK.) If they’re threatened by you mentioning this sort of evidence, I’d take it as a clear sign to change (if you possibly can).
It also puts you right on the sharp end of the distinction between what’s true of a population and what’s true for you.
“Helpful in decision-making” is a curious way of speaking about mental health. In it’s core mental health is about changing what the patient does and not about the doctor.
For a lot of mental health issues it matters whether a patient feels agency.
Don’t underrate primary literature. Reading it can help you to build understanding of what the disease is about. There are a lot of details that get stripped out in reviews.
For clarity, I meant “learn enough to be very helpful to you in your decision-making about your condition”, rather than useful to the doctor. (Which is not to say that it might not also be helpful to the doctor.)
Yes, absolutely—so for mental health issues it can be particularly helpful to learn enough about your situation and possible interventions so that you can be more involved in the decisions about them, rather than the locus of control lying with the clinician.