Question

“I don’t believe in psychology,” a relative says. “There’s no way to measure that what people say about their symptoms is true, which means they could be making it up.” Explain why self-reporting is often necessary for the mental health field and how practitioners can treat patients ethically despite the lack of objective measurements in some areas.

Answer 1

Self-reporting is necessary in the mental health field to gather subjective information about thoughts, emotions, and experiences.

Practitioners can treat patients ethically by creating a safe and confidential environment and using other assessment methods.

Step-by-step explanation:

Self-reporting is a critical component because many psychological states and experiences are subjective and cannot be directly observed or measured. Subjective symptoms like pain, nausea, and loss of appetite are integral to understanding a patient's experience.

Tools like the Wong-Baker Faces pain-rating scale attempt to provide some objectivity by having patients rate their pain, but these are still based on patients' self-reporting.

Practitioners treat patients ethically by using multiple methods to triangulate a patient's experience, such as clinical interviews, surveys, and psychometric tests with validity and reliability scales.

Ethical practice also involves informed consent, confidentiality, and professional skepticism towards potential bias in self-reports, such as the desire to appear healthier than one is, known as "faking good."

Despite these challenges, self-reporting remains necessary in psychology. Mental health professionals must employ creative and scientifically-valid methods for understanding human behavior and mental processes, while maintaining ethical standards and client dignity.