Symptoms in Relation to Psychiatric Diagnosis and Treatment

Introduction One of the points at which fundamental psychiatric knowledge seems most likely to be advanced at the present time is that of the characteristics which, within broad diagnostic groups, distinguish patients who respond favorably to treatment from those who do not. Among such characteristics, psychiatric symptoms seem worthy of careful consideration. The primary aim of this investigation was to determine whether, within the broad groups of psychoneurotic, depressive, and schizophrenic patients, those showing a good therapeutic response and those showing a poor one differed to a statistically significant degree in their psychiatric symptomatology prior to treatment. There is, of course, good reason to believe that psychiatric diagnoses are only a very approximate description of the facts and that the overlap of symptoms is extensive. A second aim of the inquiry was to discover how far the three diagnostic groups themselves differed significantly in symptoms and how great was the