ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the traditional, objective way of dealing with presenting problems–psychiatric diagnosis. Almost all psychiatrists and social scientists who have dealt with psychiatric diagnosis in a statistical fashion have reported high variability among clinics, administrative units, hospitals, and individual clinicians in their use of diagnostic categories. The divergent theories of the various clinics also account for much of the difference among them in diagnosis. Through social interaction, each clinic develops its own set of norms for the application of diagnostic terminology, for each seems to have a favorite diagnostic category. That diagnosis which the clinician felt to be more important or "basic" was recorded as the first diagnosis. Since all the data come from the same time period, any differences in diagnostic patterns in this table cannot be caused by differing fashions of diagnosis at different times. Age and sex are social factors that should be most directly related to diagnostic categories.
