Tag: Numbers

Further Thoughts on Objective(?) Data(?)

Once again exposing some bias or another1 in my thinking, I assumed everyone knew what the PHQ-9, GAD-7, and PCL-C were and how they worked. I may have even explained here at some point. or maybe I didn’t…

Anyway, the point is, I want to give a quick explanation of what they are and how they work.

All three of these are screening tools for various mental health diagnoses. The Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (nine questions) and Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 (seven questions) especially were designed for primary care providers to use to screen all their patients for depression and anxiety. The PCL-C2 is the civilian version of the PTSD screening tool developed by the military to screen troops. They rely on the frequency of symptoms like anhedonia, feelings of isolation or disconnection from others, nightmares, etc. as reported by patients. They were designed to be used by health care professionals and their patients in the setting of a therapeutic assessment. They were never intended to be self-administered, and certainly not self-interpreted. I am, in short, using them wrong3 and the numbers may or may not mean anything.

They’ve been scientifically validated and are relied upon by experts in the field so I’m more or less obligated to accept them as valid. When used as intended. I tend to have fairly concrete thinking when it comes to health care so having any kind of number to look at makes things easier. Whether or not the numbers are actually useful is a different question.

  1. I’ve never been clear on which of my many neuroses causes this to happen but for whatever reason I commonly assume that if I know something, everyone else must know it too. It was something I was consciously trying to change when I was working on my education degree and have, clearly, fallen out of the habit. ↩︎
  2. I’ll be honest, I have no idea what this stands for and I’m not going to bother to look it up. ↩︎
  3. Considering the disdain I hold for people who use the internet to diagnose themselves with various things, this may come off a bit hypocritical. I thread that needle in my mind by asserting my (still valid) credentials as a health care professional and that these are being used in the setting of receiving treatment for the relevant disorders. Hopefully I can swing a bit more nuance than someone lacking the appropriate organs diagnosing themselves with uterine fibroids. ↩︎