Abstract
Psychiatrists have tried to solve their nosological problems by arbitrary definition of entities like’ schizophrenia’. Scientists investigating the cause and treatment of mental illness have seized on these definitions in the hope that their patients will be comparable with those of other groups using the same definitions, wherever they may be. Unfortunately a large number of rival diagnostic systems have been introduced, each with its limited zone of influence. The ‘polydiagnostic approach’ is a possible remedy for this confusion. It consists of applying several different diagnostic systems to the same series of patients, enabling the relationship between clinical concepts to be examined directly and empirically.
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References
Brockingtbn IF, Kendell RE, Leff JP (1978) Definitions of schizophrenia: concordance and prediction of outcome Psychological Medicine 8, 387–398.
Brockington IF, Meltzer HY (1982) Documenting an episode of psychiatric illness: need for multiple information sources, multiple raters, and narrative Schizophrenia Bulletin Vol 8, No 3, pp485–492.
Strauss JS, Carpenter WT Jnr (1974) Characteristic symptoms and outcome in schizophrenia Archives of General Psychiatry 30, 429–434.
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© 1985 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Brockington, I. (1985). The Polydiagnostic Approach. In: Pichot, P., Berner, P., Wolf, R., Thau, K. (eds) Clinical Psychopathology Nomenclature and Classification. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-5049-9_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-5049-9_14
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
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