Posted by alexandra_k on November 5, 2004, at 13:52:35
In reply to Re: Psychiatry should be replaced with neurology, posted by Sad Sara on November 5, 2004, at 10:48:58
> You are mixing a bit here... "Psychiatry" is a branch in medicine, I think you are thinking of Psychology.
Nope, I meant psychiatry. The DSM is a psychiatric classification system that lists different mental disorders according to syndrome. There is dispute around whether the current disorders / syndromes are discrete and valid. Some people prefer a symptom approach, so that the focus of research is individual symptoms such as delusions or hallucinations rather than greater syndromes which are diagnosed on the basis of a patients meeting some prescribed threshold for displaying a certian number of symptoms. There is a concern that by taking syndromes as the basic unit of research the clinical samples are too heterogeneous as different people may meet criteria on the basis of displaying different symptoms. A consequence of this may be that we miss interesting generalisations that apply to subjects with the same symptom, such as hallucinations or delusions.
poster:alexandra_k
thread:411422
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20041105/msgs/412219.html