Adolescence and diagnostics.

The major diagnostic categories (schizophrenia, borderline disorder, depression) are reviewed and the difficulties in applying this "adult" classification to adolescence are noted. The reasons for these are numerous, i.e., history of the discovery of diseases, the similarities in psychodynamic functioning between the pathological and the "normal" in adolescence, and prognosis which varies depending on age. How, then, does one distinguish between the pathological and the normal at this age, and is the concept of crisis at all useful?