Kaleidoscope
Journal: The British Journal of Psychiatry
Year: 2018

Why are diagnostic systems so doubted? Recent news of five subtypes of type 2 diabetes was heralded as a personalised medicine breakthrough; curiously, analogous findings in psychiatry are sometimes used to accuse it of being a pseudoscience. It seems a peculiarity that any diagnostic chink in mental health is taken by some as proof of non-existence of a condition, yet those in physical health are seen as eternal shibboleths (no one seems bothered whether 'hypertension', with its expert panel-de