Determining their mental status (i.e. psychiatric diagnoses) would be termed a psychiatric evaluation. It may be done in as little as one visit, it will be part of an emergency psychiatric detention (if the person is deemed a threat to self or others), and it may be revised and revamped as the situation clarifies over time.
Psychoanalysis is a lengthy (and largely discredited) process of treatment based on what addressing Freud and associates felt to be the causes of psychiatric disease (toilet training trauma, to name but one cause).
On a fee schedule I just saw (I’ll have to find it and look at it again) for a psychiatrist it said “20 min Medication Management” was $120, the same price as 20 min therapy session. I have no idea though if you do therapy and while your there they adjust your dosage if they just charge $120 or $240.
Agreed. The more overt the disorder (the ones I seem to see on BBs are obsessive behavior/ideation and paranoia), the more readily you could make a pretty educated and informed guess as to the person’s state of mind.
I meant to say “Mom, pass the biscuits”, but what came out was “I have seriously unresolved Oedipal issues”.
To the OP, if someone was posting to a message board things that were so abnormal that you would consider psychoanalyzing them, wouldn’t they have been banned already?
Based on what a few former patients of Freudian psychoanalysts have told me, the formal answer would be, as Qadgop already told us all, “No”, but you could approximate it informally by paying me $450 and sending me PM’s for 45 minutes, to which I will not reply, and I will tell you when your 45 minutes are up. You will continue this indefinitely on a weeky basis (excluding the month of August) if you wish to reap the benefits of psychoanalysis. If you catch bubonic plague, fall down and break your patella, or a small airplane collides with your apartment building, and you choose to interpret these events as “reasons” for not showing up for your regularly scheduled appointment, I will expect payment in full for the session that you have missed.
There’s also the issue that, on the Internet, people–even people who are otherwise pretty much “normal”–may just post stuff to screw with other people’s heads, or otherwise indulge aspects of their personality they don’t actually let out in polite company.
Certainly, some of the people who come through here, based on their posts you have to figure they somehow managed to chew through the straps and broke into the warden’s office in order to gain Internet access. Other people, though, based solely on their on-line behavior, you’d be reaching for your copy of the DSM-IV; but in “real life” they might be “sane”, or at least reasonably functional and not outwardly any weirder than most people. It’s that (in)famous combination of Internet anonymity; and the lack of ordinary interpersonal cues that leads people to use smilies.
Psychiatrist here. What Qadgop says. If a patient comes in for a 20-min appt, they get their prescriptions updated, adjusted if needed, discussion of how their lives are going with/without the medications, and brief therapy as indicated. All for the one price. Not all patients are able to engage in therapy, so that’s individualized. Therapy that has no medical component is generally done by the many excellent therapists who come from other disciplines, such as psychology, education, nursing, or social work. (Or sometimes by the total turkeys who infest any population of humans.)
Ethically, we can make diagnoses after conducting a formal diagnostic evaluation and can discuss these in public only after obtaining the informed, written consent of the person evaluated. Somebody who states, “Poster A clearly has [diagnosis du jour] because his posts show all the signs of it,” is not demonstrating professionalism and may well be also demonstrating ignorance of other aspects as well.
There is a still in use a type of psychotherapy that uses a frame of reference derived from the concepts of psychoanalysis, even if the couch and the years of free association are no longer considered valuable as they once were. For some problems, for some patients, it can be very effective.
You can tell the women that really need some hard, ass paddling love making because their posts are full of hot action words like “I”, “and”, “of” & “you”. There are some smokin’ hot babes on ths board just dying for it.
I have a fixation about biscuits as compensatory behaviour for my having an incredibly small penis plus wanting to shag all of my sisters and my pet tortoise.
Seems to me that one could make a reasonably accurate guess about the various personality disorders; less so with the hardcore stuff (schizophrenia, neuroleptic-induced tardive dyskinesia, frotteurism. . . .).
