Newsletter
Risk is Not Destiny2024-09-23
“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
—Benjamin Franklin
Identifying risk in medicine in general, and psychiatry in particular, should be viewed as a good thing. You can watch for, intervene early, and preempt or mitigate full-blown disease, in most cases.
In psychiatry however, because of the current social stigma, the perception that treatments don’t work well, and that once diagnosed with something a Pandora’s box is opened and life is never the same again, people are hesitant to get tested and to know. Currently, only after they have (public) severe episodes of illness, then stigma is not an issue. At that point they want solutions, and they embrace all available possible tools.
Current and emerging precision psychiatry tools, some of them developed by my teams, solve this dilemma. They identify risk, so preemption can occur and it does not become destiny. And they identify for each person what they have and what (personalized) treatments should be tried if disease has manifested, which makes mental health disorders easier to treat, often benign and time-limited. People then move on with their lives.