One post tagged with "Psychopathology"

Psychiatry is the only area of medicine where a diagnosis is made from a catalog. DSM-5: around three hundred categories, each defined by a list of symptoms. Five out of nine — diagnosis A. Four out of seven, at least two weeks — diagnosis B. This is a conscientious inventory. But an inventory is not a map.

A dentist does not make a diagnosis from a checklist "hurts when eating, avoids cold, worries about teeth." A dentist takes an X-ray. The dentist has a structure — anatomy that explains why it hurts, not just what hurts.

In the second post a map of the inner world was drawn: 21 channels of experience, each with a numerical measure of opacity $\mathrm{Gap}(i,j) \in [0,1]$. A minimum of three channels must remain opaque — a theorem [Т], not a recommendation. Now the question: what happens when the wrong channels turn out to be opaque? Or when all channels fly open at once?

The answer: what psychiatry describes as a disorder. The difference being that now each disorder has specific coordinates in 21-dimensional space. Below is an attempt to translate psychopathology into the language of geometry. With one caveat: the mathematical framework (Gap-profiles, Hamming bound) consists of theorems [Т] and definitions [О]. The application to clinical categories is interpretation [И], requiring empirical verification.