[The crisis in psychiatric diagnosis]

The validity of psychiatric diagnosis has been in doubt recently, partly because of its unreliability and partly also as a result of sociopolitical and antipsychiatric trends. Psychiatrists rallied to meet this challenge by developing modern systems of classification. However, these were evolved with a purely descriptive intent and thus became part and parcel of "biological psychiatry". At first, the new classification systems offered the great advantage of making scientific communication easier, but they have been the target of renewed criticism because of problems such as different competing classifications, restriction of characteristic parameters to purely empirical observations, and neglect of clinically important criteria. Although diagnoses are now much more easily classified and rechecked, the development of diagnostic tools seems to have reached a limit requiring a revalidation and reconsideration of the psychopathological fundamentals of psychiatric diagnostics.