`In the past, I worked in such a research setting, where if a person met the criteria for opioid dependence, they received treatment, even if they were mildly impaired. below DSM-IV criteria. for the mess, they should look elsewhere. This was a constant concern for me, as the person who met the criteria was not always the one suffering the most distress and alternative treatments were not easy to find. Largely as a result of this experience, I find the current categorical approach to classifying people with psychopathology to be an imperfect system at best, with the main advantage of being practical when communicating with other professionals. I wonder if this convenience comes at a significant cost in terms of accuracy, which would result in an artificial limit to the range of presentations that occur in psychopathology. As the example above illustrates, the particular aspect that I find most problematic is the use of thresholds for specific symptoms, for example how long symptoms must have been present for them to be classified such as a disorder, or even the number of symptoms that should be present. be present. I think it is unlikely that a person who “almost” meets the criteria for a disorder is significantly different from a person with similar symptoms who barely meets the criteria. In private practice, these two cases would likely be treated the same, but in a setting where diagnosis serves as a screening tool, the client who meets the criteria may benefit from treatment while the other does not. . In this case, I think less specific guidelines, lacking specific numerical limits, would alleviate many of the problems. A separate, but related, issue is diagnostic accuracy when identifying a discrete disease pattern. I...... middle of paper......could be used in therapy. The obvious limitation lies in the ease of transmitting information to other professionals. I think, however, that the limitation is not a serious problem, because the usefulness of the information provided by a diagnosis is questionable. However, I give a serious advantage to categorical diagnosis in training and therapeutic research. It would be impossible to train students in the full range of possible presentations, and having a limited range of diagnoses provides a good basis for conceptual groupings. Being able to use these groupings for research also promotes better training. This is the only area where I feel a categorical diagnosis is a requirement. In conclusion, I would find that the ideal system would be training using a categorical system, but in the context of a real application, a more descriptive system..