The CAINS: Theoretical and practical advances in the assessment of negative symptoms in Schizophrenia

摘要

Explosive anger outbursts and persistent irritability are among the most problematic symptoms in child and adolescent psychiatry, and they can present as a feature of many different psychiatric illnesses. However, there are concerns that youths with chronic irritability and anger outbursts are being increasingly mis-diagnosed as having bipolar disorder (1). These concerns led to the creation of a new diagnosis for DSM-5: disruptive mood dysregulation disorder. The development of this disorder has been controversial, in part because there are no published data using the proposed diagnostic criteria for youths. The scientific support for disruptive mood dysregulation disorder comes primarily from studies of the related but not identical construct of severe mood dysregulation. The article by Copeland et al. (2) in this issue of the Journal is among the first to use empirical data to examine disruptive mood dysregulation, and in doing so it begins to fill a large and critical gap in the scientific literature (2).