Discuss issues associated with the classification and/or diagnosis of schizophrenia

Another issue surronding the diagnosis and classfication of schizophrenia is the cultral differences in diagnosis e.g A research study by Copeland et al (1971) compared 134 US psychiatrists and 194 British psychiatrists in their diagnosis of a patient, and found that 69% of the US psychiatrists diagnosed schizophrenia compared with only 2% of the British psychiatrists. This suggests that there is massive variation between the diagnosis criteria in different countries .Therefore it affects the reliability of diagnosis in schizophrenia .But however it is a correlational study so we have to be careful when using this studies because the one of the samples used could of just been mostly schizophrenic patients.

An issue surrounding diagnosis and classification of schizophrenia is also the co-mordility with depression.This is an issue because it has been found that mood disorder like depression have the same symptoms as schizophrenia and because the criteria to diagnose a schizophrenic patient is wide, in one country a patient could be diagnosed as schizophrenic whereas in another country they could diagnosed just with depression.This suggests that our classification systems for schizophrenia are unreliable due to patients being diagnosed wrongly with the criteria used.

Another issue with the classification and diagnosis is that the diagnosis for schizophrenia is self-reported in most cases ,the doctor normally asks the patients what symptoms they have,this therefore means that if a patients claimed have disillusions where they can hear voices(one well known symptom of schizophrenia) .It has been found that most people have heard voices in their lifetime which means that most people would get diagnosed with schizophrenia.A study by Rosenhan demonstrated his lack of faith in the classification and diagnostic system where he arranged for fake patients to present themselves to psychiatric hospitals claiming to be hearing voices in their heads. All were diagnosed with schizophrenia despite they displayed no further symptoms during the hospitalisation process.This points to a lack of reliability in the classification and diagnostic system of schizophrenia and shows real issues with the ICD and DSM.

To conclude this shows that classificiation and diagnosis with schizophrenia has major issues in reliability and validitiy but however has strong evidence in test-retest reliability which shows that the system has some sort of use in classification and diagnosis but isn't completely valid or reliable.