The three most widely used diagnostic systems in American psychiatry--
the Feighner criteria, the Research Diagnostic Criteria, and DSM-III--
appeared sequentially at 4-year intervals. The fact that the latter two
systems each incorporated changes in essentially all diagnostic categories
implied progress toward greater validity; however, this assumption has
rarely been tested directly. To do this, the authors applied each of these
three systems to 98 consecutively admitted patients with nonmanic
psychoses. Although family history and 6-month follow-up data strongly
supported the validity of diagnostic distinctions made in each of the three
systems, they did not show increments in validity with successively
developed criteria sets.Abstract Teaser