Glossary / History of psychiatry
Research Diagnostic Criteria
Diagnostic criteria for research in psychiatry, built by Spitzer and colleagues on the Feighner criteria. They became central to DSM-III in 1980.
Spitzer and colleagues built them on the Feighner criteria, published at Washington University in St Louis in 1972. For each illness they set out which symptoms had to be present for a diagnosis, and they became central to DSM-III[1].
According to Spitzer, an early version gave a kappa of 0.88 for the diagnosis of schizophrenia in 68 in-patients[2]. DSM-III, built on this foundation, has been described as moving psychiatry towards a research-based medical model[3].
Related terms
- Feighner criteriaDiagnostic criteria for research published in 1972 by psychiatrists at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. They spelled out which symptoms, how many and for how long, had to be present for a diagnosis, and which cases were excluded.
- DSM-IIIThe third edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published in 1980. It gave each disorder a list of diagnostic criteria, so that different clinicians would be more likely to reach the same diagnosis.
- KappaA measure of how far two raters agree, after removing the agreement expected by chance: 1 means perfect agreement and 0 means no better than chance. It was used to measure how often psychiatrists agree on a diagnosis.
Sources
- K. S. Kendler, R. A. Muñoz, G. Murphy, “The Development of the Feighner Criteria: A Historical Perspective,” American Journal of Psychiatry 167(2), 134–142 (2010).
- R. L. Spitzer, “More on Pseudoscience in Science and the Case for Psychiatric Diagnosis: A Critique of D. L. Rosenhan's 'On Being Sane in Insane Places' and 'The Contextual Nature of Psychiatric Diagnosis',” Archives of General Psychiatry 33(4), 459–470 (1976).
- M. Wilson, “DSM-III and the Transformation of American Psychiatry: A History,” American Journal of Psychiatry 150(3), 399–410 (1993).