1. The ICD-9 classification of mental disorders| A REVIEW OF ITS DEVELOPMENT AND CONTENTS
2. This is not a new controversy: it has existed for at least 2500 years. The Platonic school then maintained that disease entities ‘exist’, that they can be described and classified, and that they correspond to ideas with a real existence independent of the observer: in contrast, Aristotle and his most famous medical disciple —Hippocrates — maintained that meticulous observation of patients should be the basis of classification and that abstract classes and ideas were only tools of the human mind without independent existence. Subsequently, various names have been given to these fundamental positions — the rationalists and empiricists, the nominalists and the realists — but the controversy has remained.
3. Classification: an international perspective;Sartorius;Psychiatric Anals,1976
4. Australia, Brazil, China, Denmark, Egypt, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Indonesia, India, Japan, Nigeria, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
5. Some of these centrifugal tendencies of classificatory systems and psychiatric schools may be diminished by the impact of a major project launched in 1980. This international effort, sponsored jointly by WHO and ADAMHA, started by an intensive review of the present state of diagnosis and classification, identifying gaps in knowledge and defining priorities and methodological requirements for multicentric research to overcome them. It continued by the implementation of several major international studies, aiming to produce assessment instruments which will be applicable in different cultures, glossaries, classification proposals, and reviews of knowledge relevant to diagnosis and classification.