ABSTRACT
There are three broad diagnostic groupings of disorders particularly relevant to child psychiatrists (see Box 1.1 below).
Box 1.1 The main diagnostic groupings of childhood disorders
Classification is a means of ordering information in a language that can be understood by clinicians and researchers to describe specific disorders. There are two main classifications currently in use, the International Classification of Diseases of the World Health Organization (ICD) and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM). The most recent versions of these classification systems are the ICD-10 (see Table 1.1) and the DSM-IV. These are both operationalised classification systems with fixed criteria that define caseness resulting in many children with clear symptoms of a disorder not quite fulfilling the criteria and often falling into the sub-groups of ‘not otherwise specified’ labels.
