Psychiatric Distinctions

This paper evaluates and describes methods for making psychiatric distinctions. It is by means of psychiatric distinctions that individuals are labelled mentally ill or mentally well. Within the mentally ill category, patients are differentially placed according to the severity and type of their mental illness. The placement of individuals into psychiatric categories is an essential prerequisite not only to the clinical treatment of patients but also to any research where the objective is to determine empirical regularities associated with mental illness. Until the patient is categorized, the practitioner has no logical guide for how to perform treatment or even whether he should treat the patient-i.e. the patient may not be a patient. Similarly, unless the psychiatric researcher has categorized his subjects according to some notion of mental illness he has no way of making comparisons or of assessing change, the two essential processes in research. Thus, the logical first step for any discovery of new knowledge in the field of mental illness is to appraise the reliability and validity of methods for making psychiatric distinctions. No research findings can be more reliable or valid than the psychiatric distinctions used in carrying out the research

Mental health · Mental illness · Mentally ill · Psychiatry · Psychotherapist · Clinical Psychology · Mental Health and Psychiatry · Mental Health Treatment and Access · Psychiatric care and mental health services · Psychology

• Status Inconsistency and Psychiatric Diagnosis

  Beverly Ann Baldwin, H Hugh Floyd et al.•Journal of Health and Social…•1975

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• A behavioral classification of welfare children from survey data

  Jeanne G Eisenberg, Joanne C Gersten et al.•American Journal of Orthopsychiatry•1976

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