Is psychiatric diagnosis dead?

The title of the 2018 medical student essay prize established by the Faculty of General Adult and Community Psychiatry of the Royal College of Psychiatrists is 'Is diagnosis dead? Discuss.' It's good to see a Faculty of the College encouraging this debate.

Of course the hope of finding a neurobiological basis for psychiatric diagnosis should be dead, particularly following the failure of DSM-5 (eg. see previous post), but it isn't because the wish to find a physicalist basis for mental illness will never go away. And, psychiatric assessment has never just been about diagnosis and includes formulation (eg. see another previous post), which may well be more important than a single-word diagnosis (eg. see yet another previous post).