Am J Psychiatry 1987; 144:1471-1474
Copyright © 1987 by American Psychiatric Association
Progress in the classification of functional psychoses
W Coryell and M Zimmerman
Department of Psychiatry, University of Iowa College of Medicine, Iowa City 52242.
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.
