Advantages and disadvantages of mental disorder classification systems

Advantages

• Identification of illness pattern clusters

• Classifications simplify understanding of symptoms into something meaningful

• Collection of statistics of ‘disease’ incidence

• Allows appropriate treatment regimes and analysis of effectiveness of those treatments for particular disorders

Disadvantages

• Labels not always appropriate and can result in lack of acknowledgement or appropriate support if client is diagnosed inaccurately or doesn’t fit into “a box”

• Tendency to medicalise psychosocial and behavioural features of human behaviour

• Can stigmatise people who have been diagnosed

• Focus on illness not on health

• Forces treatment providers to use language and approaches that seem “medical” e.g. symptoms, patients rather than client and problems with implications about power and control.

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