title: Dimensional diagnosis and the medical student's grasp of psychiatry.
abstract: Two problems that interfere with the student's understanding and acceptance of psychiatric knowledge result largely from the use of a categorical model for psychiatric diagnosis. These two problems are: (1) the apparent inapplicability of the standard system of psychiatric diagnosis to real patients; and (2) the apparent irrelevance for general medical practice of psychiatric diagnosis and theory. Both problems may be avoided by presenting psychiatry in the framework of a multidimensional diagnostic schema that used familiar terms but treats them as dimensions with severe, moderate, and mild degrees of impairment rather than as categories of mutually exclusive psychiatric diseases. A teaching program is described in which detailed review of student interviews with psychiatric and especially nonpsychiatric patients is employed to demonstrate the usefulness of multidimensional psychiatric diagnosis.
mesh_terms: D000342:Affective Symptoms / Q000175:diagnosis; D004504:Education, Medical, Undergraduate; D006801:Humans; D008607:Intellectual Disability / Q000175:diagnosis; D007406:Interview, Psychological; D019965:Neurocognitive Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis; D009497:Neurotic Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis; D010554:Personality Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis; D011570:Psychiatry / Q000193:education*; D012559:Schizophrenia / Q000175:diagnosis; D013663:Teaching / Q000379:methods