Psychology
Categorising Mental Disorders
Categorizing mental disorders involves organizing and classifying different types of mental health conditions based on their symptoms and characteristics. This process helps clinicians and researchers better understand and diagnose mental illnesses, as well as develop effective treatment plans. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) are commonly used systems for categorizing mental disorders.
Written by Perlego with AI-assistance
Related key terms
1 of 5
10 Key excerpts on "Categorising Mental Disorders"
No longer available |Learn more- (Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Library Press(Publisher)
Stigma and discrimination add to the suffering associated with the disorders, and have led to various social movements attempting to increase acceptance. Classifications The definition and classification of mental disorders is a key issue for mental health and for users and providers of mental health services. Most international clinical documents use the term mental disorder. There are currently two widely established systems that classify mental disorders— ICD-10 Chapter V: Mental and behavioural disorders , part of the International Classification of Diseases produced by the World Health Organization (WHO), and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) produced by the American Psychiatric Association (APA). Both list categories of disorder and provide standardized criteria for diagnosis. They have deliberately converged their codes in recent revisions so that the manuals are often broadly comparable, although significant differences remain. Other classification schemes may be used in non-western cultures (see, for example, the Chinese Cla-ssification of Mental Disorders ), and other manuals may be used by those of alternative theoretical persuasions, for example the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual . In general, mental disorders are classified separately to neurological disorders, learning disabilities or mental retardation. Unlike most of the above systems, some approaches to classification do not employ distinct categories of disorder or dichotomous cut-offs intended to separate the abnormal from the normal. There is significant scientific debate about the different kinds of categorization and the relative merits of categorical versus non-categorical (or hybrid) schemes, with the latter including spectrum, continuum or dimensional systems. Disorders There are many different categories of mental disorder, and many different facets of human behavior and personality that can become disordered.
No longer available |Learn more- (Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Research World(Publisher)
Psychotherapy and psychiatric medication are two major treatment options as are social interventions, peer support and self-help. In some cases there may be involuntary detention and involuntary treatment where legislation allows. Stigma and discrimination add to the suffering associated with the disorders, and have led to various social movements attempting to increase acceptance. Classifications The definition and classification of mental disorders is a key issue for mental health and for users and providers of mental health services. Most international clinical documents use the term mental disorder. There are currently two widely established systems that classify mental disorders— ICD-10 Chapter V: Mental and behavioural disorders , part of the International Classification of Diseases produced by the World Health Organization (WHO), and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) produced by the American Psychiatric Association (APA). Both list categories of disorder and provide standardized criteria for diagnosis. They have deliberately converged their codes in recent revisions so that the manuals are often broadly comparable, although significant differences remain. Other classification schemes may be used in non-western cultures (see, for example, the Chinese Classification of Mental Disorders ), and other manuals may be used by those of alternative theoretical persuasions, for example the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual . In general, mental disorders are classified separately to neurological disorders, learning disabilities or mental retardation. Unlike most of the above systems, some approaches to classification do not employ distinct categories of disorder or dichotomous cut-offs intended to separate the abnormal from the normal.
eBook - PDFThe Medicalisation of Everyday Life
A Critical Perspective
- Barbara Fawcett, Zita Weber, Helen Bannister(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
26 THE MEDICALISATION OF EVERYDAY LIFE The DSM-5 contains a new and slimmed down definition of mental disorder, which, arguably, does not improve on previous definitions. According to the DSM-5 (APA 2013: 20) a mental disorder is a clinically significant disturbance in an individual’s cognition, emotional regulation, or behavior that reflects a dysfunction in the psychological, biological, or developmental processes under-lying mental functioning. Mental disorders are usually associated with significant distress or disability in social, occupational or other important activities. This definition is still vague and does not make clear what is normal and what is mentally disordered. Kirk et al. (1999) point out that no definition of ‘normal’ has ever been provided that would allow the differentiation of DSM mental disorders. Essentially, the DSM is a medicalised dictionary of mental disorders that doesn’t specify exactly what a mental disorder is. This is problematic, as Kinderman et al. (2013) point out, using the example of schizophrenia. The diagnosis for the troubling behaviour displayed is labelled ‘schizophrenia’, yet the broader context may not be taken into consideration. Is the person feeling paranoid because they have actually been victimised? This sort of diagnosis has the potential to elicit circular arguments. By not taking the person’s social and interpersonal difficulties into consideration, only a medication regime promises to achieve the desired outcome of normal functioning. Paris (2013: 60) posits that psychiatrists can only guess about how ‘to carve nature at the joints’, a phrase attributed to Aristotle, because ‘we do not know if it will even be possible to find joints to be carved’. With no biologi-cal markers to guide the practitioner, mental disorders currently overlap each other and blend into normality.
eBook - PDF- Ronald Comer, Elizabeth Gould, Adrian Furnham(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Wiley(Publisher)
Eccentric? Yes. Mentally disordered? Probably not. Source: ©Sukree Sukplang/Reuters/Corbis. CHAPTER 19 PSYCHOLOGICAL DISORDERS 544 To ascertain whether abnormality requires intervention or treatment three criteria are commonly applied throughout Europe: • Significant distress or dysfunction in the individual concerned. • Significant distress or disruption to those around them. • Behaviour that warrants the attention of health or legal authorities. To determine the exact form of an abnormality and thus its specific treatment requires the application of classification and diagnosis. Classifying and Diagnosing Psychological Disorders A symptom is a physical, behavioural or mental feature presented by a client that helps indicate a condition, ill- ness or disorder. Fatigue is often a symptom of depression, for example. Similarly, poor concentration can be a symp- tom of anxiety, and hallucinations may indicate schizo- phrenia. When certain symptoms regularly occur together and follow a particular course, clinicians agree that those symptoms make up a particular mental disorder. A list of such disorders, with descriptions of the symptoms and guidelines for determining when individuals should be assigned to the categories, is known as a classification system. The classification system that is used by most countries throughout the world is the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) , published by the World Health Organization. ICD is now in its tenth edition (ICD-10). In the United States, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is published by the American Psychiatric Association and largely adopted across the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe as well. The current version is called DSM-IV Text Revision (DSM-IV-TR) (APA, 2000) but a new version called DSM-5, due in 2013, has many changes to the categories, symptoms and criteria (Regier et al., 2011).
eBook - PDF- John Hunsley, Catherine M. Lee(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Wiley(Publisher)
The adoption of this approach has allowed clinical psychologists to draw on a vast literature about parenting, child neglect and abuse, the effects of conflict on family members, cognitive changes over the life course, and changing societal values when considering diagnostic issues. Diagnosis No diagnosis is based on a single symptom. Diagnostic criteria always include a cluster of symptoms that co-occur. Medical students often report that, in learning about different disor- ders, they recognize symptoms that they have experienced and worry that they may suffer from the serious disorder they are studying. Parents, too, hear about symptoms that are associated with childhood disorders and may be tempted to speculate that the child at the next table in a restaurant who is whooping with delight and flicking food at a friend may have a diagnosis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). developmental psychopathology: a framework for understanding problem behaviour in relation to the milestones that are specific to each stage of a person’s development. Josie Elias/Getty Images Without knowing the context of a person’s behaviour, we cannot say whether that person’s behaviour is normal. 54 CHAPTER 3 Classification and Diagnosis The diagnosis of mental disorders involves challenges that are less common in the diagnosis of physical conditions (Hyman, 2010). Most medical diagnostic systems focus not only on symptoms but also on the etiology of the condition and the ways in which external agents or external causes (such as bacteria, infectious agents, or malnutrition) gave rise to symptoms. Data from laboratory tests such as X-rays, ultrasound scans, and blood tests provide markers for many physical disorders and diseases. To date, there are virtually no comparable lab tests available for mental disorders. As a result, classification systems for mental disorders rely almost entirely on the observation of symptoms.
eBook - PDF- Japhet Killewo, Kristian Heggenhougen, Stella R. Quah(Authors)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Academic Press(Publisher)
Nature of Mental Disorder For further reading please see Farmer et al . (2002). Psychopathology Concepts of psychopathology were first described in the clinical literature on severe mental disorders such as psy-chosis in the nineteenth century (Farmer et al ., 2002). Attempts to define these with a view to their reliable mea-surement developed in the following century (Wing et al ., 1974). Soon after this, work was extended to a wide range of mental and behavioral disorders to support the emergence of detailed mental disorder classification systems (World Health Organization Division of Mental Health, 1992; World Health Organization, 1992, 1993; American Psychi-atric Association, 1994). The psychopathology of mental disorders can be considered in terms of specific mental functions. Emotion in the form of mood and anxiety is given prominence in such systems with relatively little attention given to other emotions such as anger or happiness (except in the form of inappropriate elation in mania or bipolar disorder). Abnormalities of the experience and perception of reality in the form of psychotic hallucinations is given promi-nence, together with beliefs that are clearly false and not shared with another person (in contrast to subculturally approved beliefs). Cognitive impairment as seen in mental retardation (also known as learning disability or as intel-lectual disability) and dementia also receive prominence. Problems due to misuse of psychoactive drugs and their effects on mental functioning have taken greater promi-nence in recent years. New areas hardly touched on in surveys include developmental, behavioral, and personality abnormalities. Definition and Classification of Disorders Until now the official classification systems (American Psychiatric Association, 1994; World Health Organization Division of Mental Health, 1990) have relied exclusively on binary definitions of disorders (Brugha, 2002): either the person has or does not have the disorder.
eBook - PDFIntroduction to Clinical Psychology
An Evidence-Based Approach
- John Hunsley, Catherine M. Lee(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Wiley(Publisher)
The diagnosis of mental disorders involves challenges that are less common in the diagnosis of physical conditions (Hyman, 2010). Most medical diagnostic systems focus not only on symptoms but also on the etiology of the condition and the ways in which external agents or external causes (such as bacteria, infectious agents, or malnutrition) gave rise to symptoms. Data from laboratory tests such as X-rays, ultrasound scans, and blood tests provide markers for many physical disorders and diseases. To date, there are virtually no comparable lab tests available for mental disorders. As a result, classification systems for mental disorders rely almost entirely on the observation of symptoms. This means that, in practice, most diagnostic deci- sions are derived largely from client self-report data. (We discuss the use and value of data from multiple informants in several subsequent chapters.) Personal, cultural, or professional values influence the deter- mination of what is abnormal or disordered. In defining abnor- mality, it is extremely important to rely on scientific evidence, not just value judgments. For example, beliefs based on theoretical models of human functioning may, at times, interfere with an ability to see forms of psychological distress and suffering. One of the clearest examples is the diagnosis of depression in youth. Although the problem of depression in adults has been recognized for centuries, until the 1980s mental health professionals did not evaluate or treat childhood depression. The major reason for this apparent negligence is that, based on tenets of the dominant theoretical models, childhood depression could not occur. According to psychoanalytic models, depression is a disorder of the superego. It is therefore impossible to develop depression until the stage of development at which the superego emerges. Prior to this stage, a child’s psyche is not sufficiently developed to use the types of defenses that result in the experience of depression.
- Susan Whiston(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Cengage Learning EMEA(Publisher)
All disorders included in Section II of the DSM-5 will meet the following definition L03 TABLE 15.1 Previous editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders ■ DSM-IV-TR (2000) ■ DSM-IV (1994) ■ DSM-III-R (1987) ■ DSM-III (1980) ■ DSM-II (1968) ■ DSM-I (1952) Copyright 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Chapter 15 Diagnosis 303 of a mental disorder except for “Medication-Induced Movement Disorder and Other Adverse Effects of Medication” and “Other Conditions That May Be a Focus of Clinical Attention.” The following is APA’s (2013) definition of a mental disorder: A mental disorder is a syndrome characterized by clinically significant disturbance in an individual’s cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior that reflects a dysfunction in the psychological, biological, or developmental processes underlying mental functioning. Mental disorders are usually associated with significant distress or disability in social, oc-cupational, or other important activities. An expectable or culturally approved response to a common stressor or loss, such as the death of a loved one, is not a mental disorder. Socially deviant behavior (e.g., political, religious, or sexual) and conflicts that are pri-marily between the individual and society are not mental disorders unless the deviance or conflict results from a dysfunction in the individual, as described above. (p. 20) It is sometimes difficult to determine if a client has a mental disorder, particularly when the presentation of symptoms is mild.
eBook - PDFFish's Clinical Psychopathology
Signs and Symptoms in Psychiatry
- Patricia Casey, Brendan Kelly(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- RCPsych Publications(Publisher)
Chapter 1 Classification of Psychiatric Disorders Any discussion of the classification of psychiatric disorders should begin with the frank admission that any definitive classification of disease must be based on its aetiology. Until we know the causes of the various mental illnesses, we must adopt a pragmatic approach to classification that will best enable us to care for our patients, to communicate with other health professionals and to carry out high-quality research. In physical medicine, syndromes existed long before the aetiology of these illnesses was known. Some of these syndromes have subsequently been shown to be true disease entities because they have one essential cause. Thus, smallpox and measles were carefully described and differentiated by the Arabian physician Rhazes in the tenth century AD. With each new step in the progress of medicine, such as auscultation, microscopy, immunology, electro- physiology, etc., some syndromes have been found to be true disease entities, while others have been split into discrete entities, and others still jettisoned. For example, diabetes mellitus has been shown to be a syndrome that can have several different aetiologies. On that basis, the modern approach to classification has been to establish syndromes in order to facilitate research and to assist us in extending our knowledge of them so that, ultimately, specific diseases can be identified. We must not forget that syndromes may or may not be true disease entities, and some will argue that the multifactorial aetiology of psychiatric disorder, related to both constitutional and environmental vulnerability, as well as to precipitants, may make the goal of identifying psychiatric syndromes as discrete diseases an elusive ideal. Syndromes and Diseases A syndrome is a constellation of symptoms that are unique as a group.
eBook - PDFPersonality Disorder and Serious Offending
Hospital treatment models
- Christopher Newrith, Clive Meux, Pamela Taylor(Authors)
- 2006(Publication Date)
- CRC Press(Publisher)
Labelling patients is not necessar-ily dehumanizing; it can be a great aid to selecting treatment, predicting prognosis and maintaining proper care across a variety of settings. Although many of these comments may be self-evident, they are worth repeating because, in the context of personality disorder, the criticisms of classification in general are often more pronounced. Because all personalities are unique, any form of classification will fail to do justice to their tremendous variety, but to abandon the task of sorting them out into some reasonable order merely leads to anarchy. What follows in this account is like the first response to the teacher’s whistle in the school play-ground: the children have been called to order, but are still largely engaged in their own activ-ities. The external observer only sees a sem-blance of order developing and is not particularly impressed; the same can be true about the present classification and diagnosis of personality disorder. However, when one considers that 40 years ago the classification of these conditions was almost totally ignored, one realizes how much progress we have made in a relatively short time. Throughout this chapter, the principles of a good classification system are addressed: a valid and reliable measure that commands broad agreement, a system that is clinically useful and that, ideally, cleanly divides each dis-order so that there is no overlap between them. CLASSIFICATION SYSTEMS DICHOTOMOUS VERSUS CATEGORICAL CLASSIFICATION Although doctors and decision makers in all fields of medicine prefer categorical classifica-tions to dimensional ones, there is increasing evidence from research studies in personality disorder that the dimensional system of clas-sifying personality disorder is more valid and reliable (Livesley et al., 1994; Clark et al., 1995). The major problem appears to be with the specific personality disorder diagnoses rather than with the broad concept of personal-ity disorder as a whole.
Index pages curate the most relevant extracts from our library of academic textbooks. They’ve been created using an in-house natural language model (NLM), each adding context and meaning to key research topics.
