ArticleWorld psychiatry : official journal of the World Psychiatric Association (WPA)2018
The severity of psychiatric disorders.
Article in World psychiatry : official journal of the World Psychiatric Association (WPA), 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 89 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
89 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 224 citations in OpenAlex.
- Who Benefits from Acute Psychiatric Home Treatment? A Systematic Review.Community mental health journal · 2024Pooled it
- A systematic review exploring characteristics of youth with severe and enduring mental health problems (SEMHP).European child & adolescent psychiatry · 2024Pooled it
- Molecular Signaling Pathways in Depression and Neuroinflammation: Focus on New Pathophysiological Proteins and Therapeutic Compounds.Antioxidants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Patient Perspectives on Psychiatric Polygenic Risk Scores in Reproductive Decision-Making and Polygenic Embryo Screening.American journal of medical genetics. Part B, Neuropsychiatric genetics : the official publication of the International Society of Psychiatric Genetics · 2026Article
- A Person-Centred Approach to Severe Mental Illness: The Individual Symptom Complex as Guiding Principle.Nursing inquiry · 2026Article
- The role of psychiatric-physical multimorbidity and continuity of care in seniors' medical emergency visits.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- The Impact of Pre-Existing Psychiatric Disorders on Gastric Cancer Stage and Mortality in Older Adults.Cancer medicine · 2026Article
- 'Things You Do' and Mental Health in Turkish Adolescents and Adults: Validation of the Turkish Version of Things You Do Questionnaire-15 Item.The Psychiatric quarterly · 2026Article
- Copy number variants reveal divergent genetic and diagnostic cortical signatures across psychiatric disorders.Research square · 2026Article
- Psychometric properties of the Spanish structured interview of personality organization revised (STIPO-R) in a clinical and community sample.Borderline personality disorder and emotion dysregulation · 2026Article
- School Absence and Mental Health in a Help-Seeking Sample From Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.Clinical child psychology and psychiatry · 2026Article
- Differential relationships between physical activity and mental health among adults with disabilities in Korea.BMC public health · 2026Article
- Daily Stress Variability in Two Generations of Survivors of the War in the Former Yugoslavia.Stress and health : journal of the International Society for the Investigation of Stress · 2025Article
- Integrating Heart Rate Variability Improves Machine Learning-based Prediction of Panic Disorder Symptom Severity.Clinical psychopharmacology and neuroscience : the official scientific journal of the Korean College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2025Article
- The Borderline Symptom List-Interview: development and psychometric evaluation of an observer-based instrument for assessing symptom severity in borderline personality disorder.Borderline personality disorder and emotion dysregulation · 2025Article
- Association Between Current Suicidal Ideation and Personality Traits: Analysis of the Personality Inventory for DSM-5 in a Community Mental Health Sample.Medicina (Kaunas, Lithuania) · 2025Article
- Factors Associated with Perceived Coercion in Adults Receiving Psychiatric Care: A Scoping Review.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Cortical differences across psychiatric disorders and associated common and rare genetic variants.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025Article
- Health and Socio-Demographic Factors Affecting Happiness Among Korean Adults with Moderate and Severe Disabilities: A National Survey-Based Study.Medicina (Kaunas, Lithuania) · 2025Article
- Machine learning-driven development of a stratified CES-D screening system: optimizing depression assessment through adaptive item selection.BMC psychiatry · 2025Article
29 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The issue of the severity of psychiatric disorders has great clinical importance. For example, severity influences decisions about level of care, and affects decisions to seek government assistance due to psychiatric disability. Controversy exists as to the efficacy of antidepressants across the spectrum of depression severity, and whether patients with severe depression should be preferentially treated with medication rather than psychotherapy. Measures of severity are used to evaluate outcome in treatment studies and may be used as meaningful endpoints in clinical practice. But, what does it mean to say that someone has a severe illness? Does severity refer to the number of symptoms a patient is experiencing? To the intensity of the symptoms? To symptom frequency or persistence? To the impact of symptoms on functioning or on quality of life? To the likelihood of the illness resulting in permanent disability or death? Putting aside the issue of how severity should be operationalized, another consideration is whether severity should be conceptualized similarly for all illnesses or be disorder specific. In this paper, we examine how severity is characterized in research and contemporary psychiatric diagnostic systems, with a special focus on depression and personality disorders. Our review shows that the DSM-5 has defined the severity of various disorders in different ways, and that researchers have adopted a myriad of ways of defining severity for both depression and personality disorders, although the severity of the former was predominantly defined according to scores on symptom rating scales, whereas the severity of the latter was often linked with impairments in functioning. Because the functional impact of symptom-defined disorders depends on factors extrinsic to those disorders, such as self-efficacy, resilience, coping ability, social support, cultural and social expectations, as well as the responsibilities related to one's primary role function and the availability of others to assume those responsibilities, we argue that the severity of such disorders should be defined independently from functional impairment.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.