41.1 Introduction: Over the last decades a consensus position has formed among psychiatrists and philosophers that progress in psychiatric nosology consists in the validation of descriptive categories through the discovery of underlying causal mechanisms (Andreasen 1995, Murphy 2006, Hyman 2010, Tsou 2015). Etiological means of investigation resembling those popular in the hard sciences have therefore come to be considered psychiatry's state of the art (First et al. 2002). There is enthusiasm for the notion that instead of aimlessly changing course in response to sociopolitical, commercial, and clinical trends, psychiatric classifications can be made to more closely track underlying causal mechanisms through proper iterative processes (Kendler 2009,2012).
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