Psychiatric Diagnosis

Synonyms

Diagnostic criteria; Psychiatric disorder

Definition

Psychiatric diagnosis defines a psychiatric disorder which causes subjective distress and disability and can be conceptualized based on symptomatology, epidemiology, and pathophysiology. The primary purpose of the psychiatric diagnosis is to distinguish a certain condition from non-disease conditions or other disease conditions and to make health providers communicate better with each other by using shared concepts and languages. Psychiatric diagnosis facilitates researches by maintaining the internal validity of each psychiatric disease and is important for examining the external validity of findings when applying research evidences into individual patients.

Description

The top two most important and frequently used psychiatric diagnoses classification systems are the International Classification of Disease (ICD) by World Health Organization (WHO) and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) edited by...