A comprehensive approach to psychiatric diagnosis

The author discusses problems of the typological diagnostic system currently used in psychiatry, which focuses primarily on symptoms in classifying psychiatric disorders. He describes a comprehensive diagnostic system that would involve routine evaluation of five patient characteristics: symptoms, circumstances associated with symptoms, previous duration and course of illness, quality of personal relationships, and level of work function. He suggests that such a multivariable approach to psychiatric diagnosis can provide valuable information about the patient to clinicians, researchers, and other mental health workers.