Lexicon of psychiatric and mental health terms

Lexicon of psychiatric and mental health

terms

SECOND EDITION

World Health Organization Geneva 1994

WHO Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Lexicon of psychiatric and mental health terms.-2nd ed.

1.Mental disorders-terminology 2.Psychiatry-terminology

ISBN 92 4 154466 X

(NLM Classification: WM 15)

The World Health Organization welcomes requests for permission to reproduce or translate its publications, in part or in full. Applications and enquiries should be addressed to the Office of Publications, World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland, which will be glad to provide the latest information on any changes made to the text, plans for new editions, and reprints and translations already available.

? World Health Organization 1994

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Typeset in India Printed in England

93/9727 - Macmillan/Ciays- 6500

Contents

Introduction

1

Acknowledgements

3

Definitions of terms

4

Introduction

Far from being a pastime of retired academics, psychiatric lexicography today is a necessary counterpart of the standardization of diagnosis and the refinement of classification in the mental health field. The past hvo decades have witnessed the introduction of explicit (or "operational") diagnostic criteria in a field that was formerly considered open to subjective interpretation, with clinical judgement as the final arbiter. Recent classifications of mental and behavioural disorders, such as DSM-IIIR1 and Chapter V(F) of ICD-102, have been developed with the ambitious goal of serving as clinical, research, and teaching tools rather than merely as conventions for statistical reporting of psychiatric diagnoses. Clinical descriptions and diagnostic guidelines for some 380 disorders are incorporated in The ICD-10 Classification of Mental and Behavioural Disorders: Clinical descriptions and diagnostic g11idelines, 3 which represents a major step towards the attainment of a "common language" among mental health professionals and other workers worldwide.

However, agreement and mutual understanding in the mental health field will remain incomplete or spurious unless the syntax provided by the classification and diagnostic criteria is complemented by an equally explicit and acceptable lexis. Clinical descriptions and diagnostic guidelines, explicit as they are, use terms that are not themselves defined. Many of these terms have a long history and evolved in contexts different from the one provided by current classifications. Some of them have changed their meanings repeatedly. In addition, modem psychiatry is increasingly permeated by concepts and by related terms originating in other scientific and clinical fields with which psychiatry is interacting: biology, genetics, physiology, neurology, psychology, and the social sciences. There is a practical need in clinical work teaching, and research for reference to an authoritative lexicon of terms.

In 1989 the World Health Organization published the Lexicon of psychiatric and mental health terms, Volume 1 (Lexicon 1), which contained definitions of over 300 terms that appeared in Chapter V of ICD-9.4 This was the result of a joint project between the WHO Division of Mental Health and the US Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration (ADAMHA), which had sponsored much of the work leading to a better congruence between ICD and other national classifications in the mental health field, and to the development of international diagnostic instruments for field and clinical research.

1 Diagnostic and staiisticalmmuu ................
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