Has any research been done on how clinicians' (either internists or psychiatrists) known psychological conditions influence the diagnoses, misdiagnoses, and prognoses they make?
And, related to that, has there been any concerted conscious effort made to control for the above?
(I'm also curious how medical, non-psychological conditions affect the above, but that wouldn't strictly-speaking be on topic so I'm limiting this to psychological problems for now.)
the kind of studies I mean
What I'm envisaging is a study akin to the following, and am curious about what similar studies have found:
- two pools of practicing clinicians are chosen (with random partitioning between the two),
- everyone in pool A is screened for current psychological disorders by a subset (say, three) of multiple, randomly chosen individuals from pool B,
- the professional (diagnostic) history of every clinician in pool A is reviewed, and
- the experimenter looks for patterns of correlation between mental disorders in the clinicians themselves, and the disorders that those individuals tend to diagnose / misdiagnose (sensitivity v. specificity).
the kind of (statistically significant) results I'm curious about
So, for example, do clinicians who have (to choose two disorders randomly) NPD tend to diagnose depression more often than those without NPD? And, when they do diagnose depression, do they tend to have more favorable or less favorable prognoses for their patients? What are their recommendations? And how often do their recommendations work out well v. badly? What mental characteristics are adaptive v. maladaptive within this extremely specific context?
More to the point, does it "take one to know one", or does a lack of personal experience with something provide better objectivity?
And are some disorders (maladaptive within larger society) unambiguously good across-the-board in a clinical setting, are they all harmful, or should people with disorder X specialize in disorder Y, and avoid treating patients with disorder Z?
Obviously, pool A doesn't actually need to be psych clinicians. It could be applied to GPs, oncologists, surgeons, etc.
Are you asking about clinicians that have mental disorders themselves
This. I'm assuming no one, with the DSM applied to them, would come away without something sticking. $\endgroup$