Vacca Mattia, Mura Alessandro, Carrogu Gian Pietro, Gaviano Luca, Atzori Riccardo, Petretto Donatella R
Department of Education, Philosophy and Psychology, State University of Cagliari, 09124 Cagliari, Italy.
Behav Sci (Basel). 2025 Jun 18;15(6):830. doi: 10.3390/bs15060830.
The definition of "mental disorder" (MD) is one of the most critical themes throughout the history of psychopathology and in the development of the discipline itself. Despite this theme having been addressed since ancient times, the first explicit and shared definition of MD only appeared in the seventies, soon after the first internationally shared nosographies. In this perspective paper, we focused on the definitions of MD proposed in the various versions of the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-DSM", starting from the third edition of 1980. Over about 40 years, in the various versions of the DSM, six definitions of MD were proposed. We discussed the general matrix/structure of those definitions, as well as the main similarities and/or divergences, and some of the specific constructs and approaches used in such definitions. Additionally, we examined some papers that addressed the same topic in a similar manner and discussed the general debate that accompanied the proposal of the various DSM definitions, the significant attention those definitions attracted, and some minor and major criticisms.
“精神障碍”（MD）的定义是心理病理学历史以及该学科自身发展过程中最为关键的主题之一。尽管这一主题自古代就已被提及，但MD的首个明确且得到广泛认可的定义直到20世纪70年代才出现，紧随首部国际通用的疾病分类学之后。在这篇观点论文中，我们聚焦于自1980年第三版起的各版《精神疾病诊断与统计手册 - DSM》中所提出的MD定义。在大约40年的时间里，DSM的不同版本中提出了六种MD定义。我们讨论了这些定义的总体框架/结构，以及主要的异同点，还有这些定义中所使用的一些具体概念和方法。此外，我们研究了一些以类似方式探讨同一主题的论文，并讨论了伴随各版DSM定义的提出而产生的一般性争论、这些定义所吸引的大量关注以及一些或大或小的批评意见。
