Biography, Social Stress, and the Point Prevalence of Psychogenic Disorders

Abstract

One of the consequences of the biological orientation of contemporary psychiatry and psychosomatics is that psychoanalytical, psychodynamic, and social psychological aspects are progressively losing esteem. DSM-IV will presumably abandon the term “neurosis” altogether. Nevertheless, the research project described here explicitly deals with psychogenic disorders. In an etiological sense the term “psychogenesis” refers to mental disorders which essentially develop from the biography of the social human being and do not — or only secondarily — develop from disorders of his/her biological-somatic bases of life. Thus in an operational sense we are dealing with psychoneurotic, character neurotic, and psychosomatic symptoms. They do not lead to psychotic loss of perception of reality and are not considered to be epiphenomena of basic organic diseases, i.e., we are dealing with psychogenic syndromes defined as illness described by the WHO ICD-8 codes 300 (psychoneuroses), 301 (personality disorders), 302 (sexual deviations), 303 and 304 (addictions), and 305 and 306 (psychosomatic disorders).