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A comment on Should Mental Disorders Have Names?. Parent comment

Re:Should Mental Disorders Have Names? by betulaq on Wednesday February 20, 2019 @11:18AM (#19209078)
Something like the SCID is useful as a structured way of measuring or assessing behavior. A binary output is probably not helpful though.

What's interesting is that the people who developed the SCID (and the DSM and its predecessor, the RDC) actually developed a very similar tool in the 60s, but instead of it producing binary diagnoses, it produced scale scores more like test scores. It actually had better statistical properties and provided fairly detailed information. It's always been a mystery why they moved away from that, except that the DSM as a whole moved away from that.

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Re:Should Mental Disorders Have Names? by darkerside on Wednesday February 20, 2019 @08:31PM (#19213782)
That's interesting. It reminds of the BMI, a metric intended only for use at the population level. It's been adopted (some would say misappropriated) as a yardstick for individual health, because... reasons?
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