Competing Definitions of Schizophrenia: What Can Be Learned From Polydiagnostic Studies?

摘要

The contemporary diagnoses of schizophrenia (sz)—Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition(DSM-IV) and International Classification of Diseases,10th Revision(ICD-10)—are widely considered as important scientific achievements. However, these algorithms were not a product of explicit conceptual analyses and empirical studies but defined through consensus with the purpose of improving reliability. The validity status of current definitions and of their predecessors remains unclear. The so-called “polydiagnostic approach” applies different definitions of a disorder to the same patient sample in order to compare these definitions on potential validity indicators.