Important achievements in the search for psychopathological predictors, but still a long road ahead: Editorial comment to Baldessarini RJ, Undurraga J, Vazquez GH et al. 'Predominant recurrence polarity among 928 adult international bipolar-I-disorder patients' (3)

摘要

The psychopathological features of affective disorders have been continuously debated ever since these disorders were first conceptualized in the 19th century by psychiatric pioneers such as Falret, Baillarger, Kahlbaum, and Kraepelin. Even today, classification remains problematic in clinical psychiatry: some patients' manifestations are hard to fit into one of the affective disorders as defined by DSM-IV or ICD-10. In modern scientific psychiatry, too, such issues still engender lively debate-about, for instance, the classification of schizoaffective disorder (1), or the various attempts to subclassify the affective disorders. A major step was taken in the late 1960s by, among others, Perris and Angst when they demonstrated the importance of distinguishing uni- and bipolar types of what had, till then, been the all-encompassing manic-depressive disorder described by Kraepelin.