Abnormal Psych Chapter 3

Determine what is unique about an individual with a given disorder. Assess how the person's functioning is different than their normal functioning. Use the person as their own baseline.

Determine a general class or grouping of problems to which a presenting problem belongs. Assign people to categories based on symptom similarity.

Any effort to construct groups or categories and to assign objects of people to these categories on the basis of shared attributes or relations.

Refers to classifying entities for scientific purposes.

The names or labels of the disorders that make up the nosology.

Assumes a single cause for each disorder and that each disorder is fundamentally different from all others. Used in Medicine. I doesn't work well with psychological approach.

Assumes a variety of cognitions, moods, and behaviors with which a patient presents and quantifies them on a scale.
So you would have multiple ratings for a variety of dimensions such as
-Anxiety-Depression-Somatic complaints -Psychotic symptoms.

Identifies certain essential characteristics of an entity sufficiently to allow you (and others) to classify it; but it also allows for certain "nonessential" variations that do not necessarily change in the classification.
Prototypical approach.. the Dog picture.

Two clinicians interviewing the same patient at separate times on the same day will identify the same set of behaviors and emotions that make up the problem. They will arrive at the same diagnosis.

Construct Validity-
Criterion Validity
Content Validity

The signs and symptoms chosen as the criteria for the presence of a diagnostic category "hang together" consistently or correlate.

The diagnosis is useful to the clinician in that it tells the clinician what is likely to happen with the prototypical patient. It predicts the future course of the disorder and the likely response to one treatment or another.

The criteria for a diagnosis reflects the way most experts in the field think of the disorder.

Emil Kraepelin: wrote Textbook of Psychiatry in which he described disorders as Schizophrenia and Manic Depressive disorder
WHO (1948) added psychological disorders to its ICD
1952 -- the American Psychiatric Association published the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) 1968- The APA published the DSM-II

Introduced a multi-axial diagnostic system. Major revision.