The interview Prediction and Philosophy specifically relates to my topic of research: diagnosing schizophrenia, because of its discussion of the relationship between the client and the diviner. In this interview, Alyssa Goodman references Ifa divination in which a diviner trains for many years and knows their clients very personally and thus makes a prediction of their behavior on this basis. My topic is about diagnosing schizophrenia where there is a very special relationship between the diviner and the client. A psychiatrist who diagnoses a patient with schizophrenia of course has years upon years of training and ideally sees their patient for many sessions and performs various analytical tasks in order to get to know their patient and diagnose them with the disease. There is an incredible amount of understanding about a patient and their past that a diagnoser has to have in order to correctly perform the diagnosis because, as Prof. Agustín Rayo mentions, we are better at predicting behavior of the people we know best. Even then however, there is still uncertainty with diagnosis because of imperfect information. In an ideal world with this scenario, a medical professional would need perfect information about their client to perform the correct diagnosis which brings the philosophical question that was also discussed in the interview — whether the world is deterministic in this sense. In this case, imperfect information impedes our ability to accurately diagnose schizophrenia 100% of the time and it remains one of the most highly misdiagnosed mental disorders to this day. Additionally, Prof. Rayo talks about trusting a prediction despite its unreliability “as long as it is more reliable than any of the other methods” (00:32:40) which I believe resonates very deeply with my research on schizophrenia. Despite the misdiagnosis rate of schizophrenia, it is still important to trust and take the care given to patients from medical professionals because medical care in cases of mental illness is very important for the well-being of an individual and the “other methods” would refer to instances of self-diagnosis which can actually be very dangerous for individuals, especially when accompanies with self medication and other forms of pharmacotherapy that are self induced.
This image below is an example of the complex relationships a patient can have with their mental wellness providers.
Tzartzas, Konstantinos & Oberhauser, Pierre-Nicolas & Marion-Veyron, Régis & Saillant, Stéphane. (2022). Psychiatric consultation in general practitioners’ daily practice: a qualitative study on the experience of consultation-liaison psychiatry interventions in primary care settings in French-speaking Switzerland. BMC Primary Care. 23. 10.1186/s12875-022-01937-y.