Psychiatric diagnosis in Japan. 1. A study on diagnostic labels used by practitioners

In a questionnaire survey, a list of 64 psychiatric diagnostic labels was presented to 20 randomly selected Japanese psychiatrists affiliated to a university department of psychiatry. For each label, they were asked (2) whether they used it in everyday practice, (b) whether they rarely used it but would do so if faced with such a case, or (c) whether they had never and would never use it. It was found that these Japanese psychiatrists used a relatively small number of diagnostic categories; in their classificatory system, functional mental disorders would be dichotomized into psychoses and neuroses with the former further divided into schizophrenic, atypical and manic-depressive psychoses, and the latter divided into seven subcategories, i.e., anxiety neurosis, hysteria, depressive neurosis, phobia, obsessive compulsive neurosis, depersonalization neurosis and hypochondriasis.