Discuss the Issues Raised in the Classification and Diagnosis of Schizophrenia.

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Discuss the issues raised in the classification and diagnosis of schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a mental disorder it seen as the breakdown of thought processes and impaired emotional responses, some symptoms are hallucinations and delusions. Schizophrenia is classed in two different ways DSM and ICD-10. DSM is commonly used in America it has 5 sub types patient should display for six months before being diagnosed and treated for schizophrenia. Whereas ICD-10 which is commonly used in Europe as 7 subtypes patient should display for 1 month. There are two main issues surrounding the classification and diagnosis of schizophrenia these are reliability and validity. First of all the diagnostic criteria is there to enable people in the medical field i.e. doctors, nurses, psychiatrists’ e.t.c to organise data, to provide a summary of the main symptoms, to see whether or not the client is schizophrenic and to communicate with each other to ensure correct treatment is given. A problem of the diagnosis of schizophrenia known as co-morbidity this is when the symptoms of schizophrenia overlap with many other disorders, such as, depression and bipolar disorder. This is a problem because the patient may be misdiagnosed and given the wrong type of treatment which will not cure the symptoms they have and may cause another type of illness. This can be solved by multiple diagnosis this will also improve the inter rater reliability. Reliability is the extent in to which two or more medical specialists have consistent results in their diagnosis. The validity externally is very difficult as there are cultural barriers, as psychiatrists from different cultures interpret symptoms differently resulting in people being diagnosed schizophrenia in one culture but not in another. Evidence for this is Copeland’s study which showed that when American (US) and British psychiatrists

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