To the Editor: In his review of my book titled
Pharmacotherapy for Mood, Anxiety, and Cognitive Disorders, edited by U. Halbreich and S.A. Montgomery, Donald F. Klein, M.D.
+(1), mentions my plea to "focus on the functional impairments" in psychiatric diagnosis and calls this approach "premature"
+(1, p. 166). By functionalization, I mean dissection of the psychiatric syndromes diagnosed in a given patient into their component parts, i.e., the psychopathological symptoms, followed by attempts to identify the psychic dysfunctions generating the phenomena that patients experience and observers register as psychopathological symptoms
+(2). The focus of biological psychiatry, we maintain, should be less on disease entities or syndromes than on exploring the neurobiological underpinnings of psychic (dys)functions
+(3).