An American view of the ICD-10 personality disorders

The 1986 version of the ICD-10 diagnostic criteria for the personality disorders was analyzed. In one part of the study, clinicians in the United States were asked to assign the ICD-10 criteria to the ICD-10 categories. In a second part, the ICD-10 criteria were assigned to DSM-III-R categories. In the first part, the face validities of the ICD-10 criteria were highly variable. Thirty percent of the criteria were assigned to the correct parent category by over 80% of the clinicians. In contrast, 34% of the criteria failed to be correctly assigned by at least half of the clinicians. Concerning the correspondence between ICD-10 and DSM-III-R categories, only anankastic (ICD) and obsessive-compulsive (DSM) showed a high level of correspondence. The correspondences of anxious (ICD) with avoidant (DSM), impulsive (ICD) with borderline (DSM), and histronic (ICD) with histrionic (DSM) were poor.