Classification of Mental Disorders

Classification and mental Disorders: Class Test Q/As

1. In abnormal psychology Classification involves…..
….attempt to delineate meaningful sub-varieties of maladaptive behaviors.

2. Functions served by/uses of Classification?
-Necessary as a first step toward introducing order into the discussion of nature, causes and treatment of maladaptive behavior.
-Enables communication about particular clusters of abnormal behavior in agreed upon and relatively precise ways.
-Makes possible to collect statistics on how common are various types of disorders.

3.What is reliability in the context of Classification?
….an index of the extent to which different observers/experts can agree that a person’s behavior fits a given diagnostic class. If they don’t agree, it may mean that the classification criteria are not precise enough to determine whether the suspected disorder is present or absent.

4. Validity of Cl. Refers to…..
In this context validity is defined by the degree to which a diagnosis accurately conveys to us something clinically important about a person whose behavior fits the category, such as helping to predict the future course of the disorder….

5. Normally Validity presupposes Reliability. Explain
Logic: If we cant agree on the class to which a disordered person’s behavior belongs, then the question of the validity of the diagnostic classification that may be under consideration becomes irrelevant.

6. Good Reliability does not itself guarantee validity. Explain
Reliable assignment of a person’s behavior to a given class of mental disorder will prove useful only to the extent that the validity of that class has been established through research.

7. Identify and Define the 3 basic approaches possible for classifying abnormal behavior.
- Categorical – All human behavior can be divided into the categories of healthy and disordered. Within the ‘disordered’ exist discrete, non-overlapping classes and types of disorder having a high degree of within class homogeneity in both ‘symptoms displayed’ the underlying organization of the disorder identified.
- Dimensional - …assumes that a person’s typical behavior is the product of differing strengths or intensities of behavior along several definable dimensions such as …mood, aggressiveness, suspiciousness etc. Normal would be discriminated from abnormal by precise statistical criteria applied to dimensional intensities.

-Prototypal – prototype is a conceptual entity depicting an idealized combination of characteristics that more or less regularly occur together in a less than perfect or standard way at the level of observation. No member of a prototypally defined group may actually have all the characteristics of the prototype. Also, some characteristics may be shared among different prototypes…Central features of the various identified disorders are often somewhat vague, as are the boundaries separating one disorder from the other…hence Prototypes of abnormal behavior.

8. Limitations of DSM Cl. Becoz of it being a Categorical approach…
…The disorders people actually suffer are often not as finely differentiated as is the DSM grid on which they must be mapped.
So strict categorical system rarely represents abnormalities of behavior to which human beings are subjected…

9/10. What do you understand by the Multiaxial approach of DSM and which revision of DSM introduced it?
I needn’t write this one!!