A phenomenological representation of neurodevelopmental disorders in children and adolescents: A graphic organization

Psychiatric nosology serves both clinical and research needs by providing a common language and informing healthcare planning. However, a movement toward transdiagnostic approaches is growing for assessments and care management of neurodevelopment disorders. During childhood and adolescence, symptoms appear as developmental delays. They often overlap across disorders, making the diagnosis difficult. To account for the multidimensional symptomatology, we propose a visualization of neurodevelopmental disorders phenomenology that would make it easier to analyze an individual as a network of diagnostic criteria whose interactions can compensate for each other and determine a pathological, at-risk or healthy impact. Such spatial organization would allow for the diagnostic criteria to be ordered over time, prioritized, and shared more effectively beyond the categorial diagnosis. Symptoms for neurodevelopmental disorders were grouped according to a hierarchy of phenomenological and symptomatological terms found in the main reference manuals and in the didactic consensus reported in the latest international reviews. They fall into four major domains: cognition, emotion, behavior and motricity while the operational diagnostic criteria were organized into a multiscalar hierarchy with a notion of order following a circular tree structure: the ‘sunburst’. A graphic, visual, dynamic and hierarchical organization was proposed to handle all the phenomenology terms used in children, adolescents and young adults (aged 5–25) more easily and to convey them to the parties involved. Far from being exhaustive, this visual representation aims to facilitate the use of psychiatric phenomenology while maintaining a critical, dynamic and evolving approach to scientific knowledge and clinical practice.