Classification of psychopathology: goals and methods in an empirical approach

Abstract

Many have criticized the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSMIV; American Psychiatric Association, 1994), and few regard it as a vehicle of truth, yet its most serious limitation is that its frank operationism in defining manifest categories has distracted attention from theories about what is going on at the latent level. We sketch a Generalized Interpersonal Theory of Personality and Psychopathology and apply it to interpersonal aspects of depression to illustrate how structural individual differences combine with functional dynamic processes to cause interpersonal behavior and affect. Such a causal account relies on a realist ontology in which manifest diagnoses are only a means to learning about the latent distribution, whether categorical or dimensional. Comorbidity of DSM diagnoses suggests that dimensionality will be the rule, not the exception, with internalization and externalization describing common diagnoses.