Values in psychiatric diagnosis: Executive summary of a report to the chair of the ICD-12/DSM-VI Coordination Task Force (Dateline 2010)

This paper reproduces the executive summary of a report on values in psychiatric diagnosis commissioned by the chair of the ICD-12/DSM-VI Co-ordination Task Force, newly established in 2010 following the publication of ICD-II and DSM-V. The report describes a programme of research on values in psychiatric diagnosis carried out in the first decade of the twenty-first century. This programme paralleled the twentieth-century programme of research on the descriptive (or factual) elements in diagnosis. The report includes concrete proposals for re-drafting key sections of DSM and corresponding sections of ICD. These proposals add values to, rather than subtracting science from, psychiatric classification. This is shown to have put psychiatry at the leading edge of twenty-first century medical science by 2010. Copyright (C) 2002 S. Karger AG, Basel.