Mental illness classification

Mental illness—Classification. 2. Mental illness—Diagnosis. I. Kotov, Roman. II. Joiner, Thomas E. III. Title. 

Definitions relevant to classification should be reviewed before we continue. The act of classification is typically defined as the process of making sense of entities. To be more precise, classification is concerned with forming classes of entities. Determining whether something is a mental illness or... 

The process of classification in terms of each method of discrimination among diagnostic entities rests on two assumptions. First, the diagnostic entity or subtype is presumed to be a mental disorder. Second, the diagnostic entity is presumed to be discriminable from other mental disorders on some basis. Evaluation of this first assumption returns us to the earlier discussion of what constitutes a mental illness, so we do not need to consider this further. The second assumption raises a new question relevant to classification. Is this condition significantly unique from all other diagnostic categories An answer to this question should be empirically based, but the type of answer received may depend on the methods used to obtain the answer. Next, we consider different methods of classification. 

The major authority for medicine in the Middle Ages was Galen of Pergamon, who worked in Rome in the second century AD. Galen adopted the humoral theory of Hippocrates, including the classification of mental illnesses, and his therapeutic recommendations were also based on the tradition of the Hippocratic school diet, vomiting, blood-letting and the administration of soporifics. 

Older classifications of psychiatric disorder divided diseases into psychoses and neuroses. The term psychosis is still widely used to describe a severe mental illness with the presence of hallucinations, delusions or extreme abnormalities of behaviour including marked overactivity, retardation and catatonia, usually accompanied by a lack of insight. Psychotic disorders therefore include schizophrenia, severe forms of depression and mania. Psychosis may also be due to illicit substances or organic conditions. Clinical features of schizophrenia may be subdivided into positive symptoms, which include hallucinations, delusions and thought disorder and negative symptoms such as apathy, flattening of affect and poverty of speech. 

Account for all the parts in your division or classification. Don t, for instance, claim to classify all the evergreen trees native to your hometown and then leave out one or more species. For a short essay, narrow your ruling principle rather than omit categories. You couldn t, for instance, classify all the architectural styles in America in a short paper, but you might discuss the major styles on your campus. In the same manner, the enormous task of classifying all types of mental illness could be narrowed to the most common forms of childhood schizophrenia. However you narrow your topic, remember that in a formal classification, all the parts must be accounted for. 

The success of these classifications is a direct result of the adoption of a descriptive approach to the definition of mental disorders, more or less consciously emulating the scientific basis of disease classification in physical medicine.If mental illnesses are physical diseases, why is there a need to emulate the scientific basis of disease classification in physical medicine The need to emulate isprima facie evidence that mental illnesses are not diseases. Nevertheless, Fulford maintains Once illness and disease are clearly distinguished, however, it becomes possible to compare like with like, mental illness ... 

I made this point more than forty years ago. See T. S. Szasz, The classification of mental illness A situational analysis of psychiatric operations, Psychiatric Quarterly, 33 77—101 (January), 1959. 

The term stigma, writes Goffman, refer[s] to an attribute that is deeply discrediting. . Being considered or labeled mentally disordered—abnormal, crazy, mad, psychotic, sick, it matters not what variant is used—is the most profoundly discrediting classification that can be imposed on a person today. Mental illness casts... 

Many reports of mental illness or response of specific symptoms to putative CNS agents are ambiguous and unverifiable at best. As constellated and systematized by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV) or International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Edition (ICD-10), for example, major depressive disorder is a subjective state of continuous distress lasting at least two weeks during which the depressed individual must report... 

The term "bipolar disorder" originally referred to manic-depressive illnesses characterized by both manic and depressive episodes. In recent years, the concept of bipolar disorder has been broadened to include subtypes with similar clinical courses, phenomenology, family histories and treatment responses. These subtypes are thought to form a continuum of disorders that, while differing in severity, are related. Readers are referred to the Diagnostic and Statisticial Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM-IV) for details of this classification. 

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