Investigating Clinician Adherence to Diagnosis by Criteria: A Replication of Morey and Ochoa (1989)

Morey and Ochoa (1989) performed a study in which clinicians generated clinical and criterion-based diagnoses. The Morey and Ochoa results suggested that “clinicians do not adhere closely to DSM-III criteria in assigning personality disorder diagnoses” (p. 190). The current study is replication of the Morey and Ochoa study using the final DSM-III-R diagnostic criteria. Our results largely supported the earlier findings on variables that predict the overdiagnosis of personality disorders (e.g., the presence of “recurrent suicidal gestures” leads to an overdiagnosis of borderline personality disorder). Also, our results replicated the earlier finding that clinicians were not likely to overdiagnose female patients as having histrionic personality disorder.