Psychiatric Diagnosis: A Comparative Study in North Carolina, London and Glasgow

Abstract

“What's the use of their having names” the Gnat said, “if they won't answer to them?” “No use to them“, said Alice, “but it's useful to the people that name them, I suppose. If not, why do things have names at all?”

The Comprehensive Assessment of Symptoms and History (CASH)

“…An obvious example is the variation over the past several decades in the emphasis on the bleulerian "four As" vs schneiderian first-rank symptoms for the definition of schizophrenia.23"28 Nor is there a simple con¬ sensus about using duration features to define schizophre¬ nia; the International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision, is likely to require only 1 month of symptoms, while DSM-IV will probably continue to require a 6-month duration.2931 These differences across time and space reflect an ongoing and legitimate controversy about the definition of schizophrenia that a sophisticated research program should be equipped to explore. 4. Research should therefore focus on a comprehensive description of psychopathology as well as on diagnosis.…”

Problems Implicit in the Cultural and Social Study of Depression

“…In one of diese studies, examining psychiatrists were furnished additional background data on the patients. Despite the fact that U.S. and U.K. psychiatrists were evaluating the "same" patients, as it were, across-nation differences in proportion of depression still prevailed and conformed to expectations (22). The other study, which used only the audio-visual tapes and did not furnish psychiatrists background information, also produced significant across-nation differences in use of psychotic diagnostic categories as anticipated.…”

Clinical assessment of psychiatric consultations in a medical long‐term care facility: Interrater reliability for DSM‐III diagnostic groups

“…The study used DSM-I11 criteria, was restricted only to depression, and reports an interrater reliability coefficient of 0.84 in a sample of 30 intermediate care nursing home patients. However, the authors did not explain how the coefficient was derived and it is not clear if the Kappa statistic was Sandifer and Hordein, 1968;Schmidt and Fonda, 1956) that allow for their computation retrospectively as done by Spitzer and Fleiss (1974). An overview of these results is shown in Table 4.…”