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Heroin Addiction and Related Clinical Problems: 2019, 21, N5 (pages: 7 - 12)

Toward Diagnostic and Therapeutic Relativism in Psychiatry and Addiction Medicine

Mendelevich V.

Summary: This article is devoted to the analysis of the dual attitude towards patients who have a behavioural pathology, including personal, addictive, sexual and impulse disorders in psychiatry. On the one hand, these disorders are admitted as psychiatric diagnoses classified in ICD and DSM. At the same time, such patients are denied the opportunity to benefit from a patient's lawful rights (e.g. sick lists, disability). Attention has been directed to the medicalization of behavioural deviance with insufficient scientific validity to justify their inclusion in psychiatric classifications. The question is raised as to the necessity of discussing the removal of these diagnostic categories from the psychiatric classification.