Psychiatry's failure to validate its diagnostic constructs is often attributed to the prioritizing of reliability over validity in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). I argue that a more powerful way in which the DSM has retarded biomedical progress is by encouraging unwarranted optimism about diagnostic discrimination: the assumption that our diagnostic tests group patients together in ways that allow for relevant facts about mental disorder to be discovered. I argue that the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) framework, a new paradigm for classifying objects of psychiatric research, solves some of the challenges brought on by this assumption.
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