Robert Kendell: his career and contribution to psychiatric diagnosis

This paper reviews the career of Robert Kendell with emphasis on his contribution to diagnosis in psychiatry. His studies on the classification of depression showed that symptoms were distributed on a continuum and that division of depression into sub-types was not justified. Similarly he showed there was no clear-cut distinction between symptoms of schizophrenia and affective psychoses. He examined Scadding's definition of disease as it applied to psychiatry and questioned whether some conditions such as neuroses and personality disorders would qualify as illnesses. He concluded that available evidence supported a dimensional rather than a categorical approach to diagnosis.