Friday, July 21, 2017

Overemphasis on disease entities in psychosis

I have mentioned in a previous post that Jim van Os wants to abandon the term 'schizophrenia'. In a follow up article, Guloksuz and he essentially argue for a unitary model of psychosis.

However, in a way, this is missing the point. They acknowledge the "lack of diagnostic markers in psychiatry" but seem to express surprise that this "impedes an objective classification". They seem to think it was a good idea that RDoC (eg. see previous post) was set up to create a so-called objective classification, whereas what they need to do is recognise that classification is inevitable subjective, at least to some extent (eg. see my article).

They still think that there is a likelihood of "distinct diseases" in the broad psychosis spectrum disorder. This is where they are wrong and they need to give up the wish to discover such entities (eg. see previous post), whether it's schizophrenia or a more unitary psychosis.

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