Psychotic Disorders in ICD-11

Abstract

SummaryWithin the efforts to revise ICD-10, the World Health Organization (WHO) has appointed a disorder-specific Working Group on the Classification of Psychotic Disorders (WGPD). The WGPD has proposed several changes to the classification criteria of schizophrenia and other primary psychotic disorders in order to increase the clinical utility, reliability and validity of the diagnostic classification. The main proposals include changes to the chapter title, the replacement of existing schizophrenia subtypes with symptom specifiers, stricter diagnostic criteria for schizoaffective disorder, a reorganization of the delusional disorders and the acute and transient psychotic disorders, as well as the revision of course specifiers. These proposed revisions are subject to field trials with the aim of studying whether they will lead to an improvement of the classification system in comparison to its previous version. The proposals are compared with revisions of the according DSM-5 chapter. The impact of novel results from neuroscience and genetics on the current proposals is discussed, also with respect to future classification strategies such as the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) project.