DSM-5 and the Research Domain Criteria: 100 Years After Jaspers’ General Psychopathology

According to Insel et al. (11), “the RDoC framework conceptualizes mental illness as brain disorders. In contrast to neurological disorders with identifiable lesions, mental disorders can be addressed as disorders of brain circuits.” At the beginning of the 20th century, Wernicke, already famous for describing the sensory speech center, also wrote a textbook including a pathophysiological model of the relationship between brain and behavior, which became one of the most important competitors of Kraepelin’s textbook (12, 13). According to Jaspers, Wernicke believed that all mental illnesses are “cerebral illnesses in the sense that they can be wholly comprehended in terms of cerebral processes” (3). If Wernicke had not died young, we psychiatrists might be living in a “Wernickian world” instead of a “Kraepelinian world” (13). Although Jaspers acknowledges that Wernicke’s pathophysiological model applied well to aphasia and other neurological disorders, Jaspers thought Wernicke erred in extending it to all psychiatric disorders. Jaspers contrasted Wernicke and Sigmund Freud, who were both disciples of the same Viennese mentor, Theodor Meynert, saying that they were positioned at opposite extremes in psychiatry (3). In Jaspers’ view, Wernicke thought that “explaining” was the only methodology needed in psychiatry. On the other hand, Freud thought that “understanding” was the only methodology needed in psychiatry. The RDoC’s focus on brain disorders implies a view similar to Wernicke’s that explaining is the only methodology needed in psychiatry.

The diagnostic scheme for psychiatric disorders developed by the Department of Psychiatry at Washington University (14), which led to DSM-III, DSM-IV, and DSM-5, is a Kraepelinian nosological model where mental disorders follow the medical model of disease as a set of identifiable symptoms. Jaspers was critical of Kraepelin’s idealization of the medical model of general paralysis of the insane (neurosyphilis) as a model for psychiatric disorders, with each disorder having a unique cause, set of symptoms, course, outcome, and neuropathology. In General Psychopathology, Jaspers proposed that some psychiatric disorders follow the traditional medical model, principally those that were called organic mental disorders in DSM-III. Jaspers called them “known somatic illnesses with psychic disturbances” (“Group I”). Other psychiatric disorders, he proposed, were not medical disorders but variations of normality; Jaspers called these disorders of personality, including “abnormal reactions, neurosis and neurotic syndromes, as well as abnormal personalities and their developments” (“Group III”). Situated between them were the psychoses (“Group II”), which, according to Jaspers, could be distinguished from normality but were not clearly separated from each other—e.g., intermediate cases between schizophrenia and manic-depressive illnesses. Jaspers felt that Kraepelin’s denial of the heterogeneous nature of mental disorders failed to capture some psychiatric disorders correctly (3).

Jaspers’ critiques a century ago of Wernicke’s brain pathophysiological model and Kraepelin’s medical model might thus be applied contemporarily to RDoC and DSM-5. We still struggle 100 years later with the issues that Jaspers raised: 1) psychiatry is a hybrid scientific discipline that must include in its research enterprise patients’ beliefs and culture, influences not captured by traditional scientific reductionism, and 2) psychiatry encompasses heterogeneous disorders, not just those that follow the traditional medical model.