Speaking as a daily TaskPaper user, this looks great! I totally get why you're doing the things you're doing with this, implementation-wise, and what you're able to achieve because of it.
Having said that, you know very well what a tough sell it is the more general purpose a tool is, and this is very general purpose. I hope having it out there spurs some ideas around how the novel features of this infrastructure can be the basis for some more concrete and easier to market solutions.
Has anything improved recently for RM2 around secure sync to a LAN? Would like to experiment with one for my psychiatrist wife to replace her paper chart notes, but anything hitting an external cloud service is out of the question for patient information. Sync via cable would be too obtrusive. And I gather handwriting recognition etc. is done via cloud.
Off topic, but one of my CS professors was part of the original Simula group. Had long sinced moved onto more formalized approaches, i.e., denotational semantics. On more than one occasion was heard to say "the only good object is a dead object."
On the other hand, there are so many opportunities for experimental design limiting the applicability of results in mental health experiments, that sample size and distribution doesn't even begin to touch on it. Bottom line: getting a meaningful result that is widely applicable is a horrendously complex undertaking.
Totally agree on your last point. There's little connection between DSM and treatment guidelines (which do exist, separately). And treatment is so fragmented between multiple care providers (with most people accessing a small subset) that many obvious things get lost.
Have met lots of people who are depressed and don't have a troubled past or present. Your descriptions of etiologies, how medications function and help, etc. are simplistic and ignorant at best. My opinion of your opinion is not high, but luckily that's not a good basis for judgment.
I'd agree in so far as it makes pulling scams (or innocently giving useless advice) far too easy:
"I had depression, and I tried X, and it worked. You've got depression, so you should try X." Extremely unlikely to be helpful, and often can be harmful.
Reading some of the comments is a good reminder that solid and meaningful mental health research is very tough and expensive, just based on the sheer variability, which can't be meaningfully captured by 99.9% of studies. Each needs to be seen as one piece in a much, much larger puzzle.
Applying the (current for any given time) criteria for depression requires a certain amount of training and skill, and the point form list of symptoms that you see as the first section in each diagnosis in the DSM-5 is not standalone. To mention one huge but often-overlooked example, something isn't a mental illness unless it significantly interferes with your life and functioning.
Not to say that people don't incorrectly make diagnoses all the time.
Many of these studies also rely on rating scales (typically HAMD or even PHQ9 for depression) that are a measure of depressive symptoms but don't in themselves have the power to make a diagnosis.
You're probably confusing science as a top-down enterprise rather than a field that works bottom-up (where "bottom" would be grad students). Evidence emerges and builds from below.
There's an entire "field of study" that seems designed to prove that through the age-old mechanism of twisting logic into absurd pretzel knots that don't hold up to scrutiny from any but the most casual observer. It's called antipsychiatry.
Depends how it's organized, but it could be much better. In Canada, physicians don't need to get approval before they do everything, admin overhead for a physician to bill is a matter of a few minutes a week. Not two full-time staff members just for that.
People seem to think that if you move to single payer that the single payer would behave like any of the existing payers, i.e. you call to fight for approval for everything you do, argue about fees for each item, denying things is routine, blah blah blah.
If you have a single payer system, it doesn't have to work that way. Not even close!
That also doesn't factor in the indirect benefits to the economy, like all the people who can't start a new business (etc.), being stuck in jobs they don't want because if they left they'd lose their benefits.
Having said that, you know very well what a tough sell it is the more general purpose a tool is, and this is very general purpose. I hope having it out there spurs some ideas around how the novel features of this infrastructure can be the basis for some more concrete and easier to market solutions.