Letter to the Editor

Excerpt

In his interesting Editorial on Categories, continua and the growth of psychiatric knowledge, Paul Bebbington [1] slightly mis-states my earlier paper. I was not arguing that all common mental disorders can be reduced to “overarching anxious depression domain, together with single symptom qualifiers such as obsession or panic”, for two reasons: first, the additional symptoms are in the form of a multi-symptom sets of symptoms rather than a single symptom, and second it is possible to have a common mental disorder without being at all anxious—for example, non-anxious depression. As Wittchen et al. [2] argued, depression can result from anxious symptoms or by an independent pathway. Indeed, the nature of our present classification of common mental disorders encourages the practice of including quite heterogeneous disorders under the same label [3, 4]. …