When patients present with conditions like psychosis, their caregivers use language to study their cognitive function and, hopefully, reach a diagnosis that will pave the way to an effective treatment plan.
So far, however, psychiatrists only examine their patients in one language, despite the fact that about half of the people in the world are actually bilingual.
We know that resources are often very tight in medicine, but ideally bilingual patients presenting with psychiatric illness would be assessed in both of the languages they speak, to see if there are any differences between how their illness manifests, depending on the language they are speaking, and whether any future treatment plan can take their bilingualism into consideration.
Also, purely from a research point of view, given that we know that bilingualism offers some protection against age-related cognitive decline, it would be fascinating to explore whether or not – and how – it interacts with the wide variety of psychiatric illnesses people can suffer from.
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