In this episode of Off Label, we unpack a paper by Dr. Steve Rondeau that tackles one of the biggest challenges in mental health care: diagnostic heterogeneity. When two patients present with the same symptoms but have entirely different underlying conditions, misdiagnosis becomes almost inevitable—and treatment suffers.
The paper explains how overlapping symptoms, frequent comorbidities, and decades of generalized diagnostic frameworks contribute to high error rates and growing patient distrust. Standardized assessments simply weren’t built to capture the genetic, environmental, and social differences that shape each individual’s mental health.
Dr. Rondeau makes a compelling case for precision psychiatry—an approach that embraces differential diagnosis, holistic context, and future tools like neuroimaging and biomarkers to guide more accurate, personalized treatment plans.
If you're a clinician, parent, or mental health advocate, this episode will reshape how you think about diagnosis and why individualized care is the future of psychiatry.
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