Comorbidity - Mental Health

Mental Health

In psychiatry, psychology and mental health counseling comorbidity refers to the presence of more than one diagnosis occurring in an individual at the same time. However, in psychiatric classification, comorbidity does not necessarily imply the presence of multiple diseases, but instead can reflect our current inability to supply a single diagnosis that accounts for all symptoms. On the DSM Axis I, Major Depressive Disorder is a very common comorbid disorder. The Axis II personality disorders are often criticized because their comorbidity rates are excessively high, approaching 60% in some cases, indicating to critics the possibility that these categories of mental illness are too imprecisely distinguished to be usefully valid for diagnostic purposes and, thus, for deciding how treatment resources should be allocated.

The term 'comorbidity' was introduced in medicine by Feinstein (1970) to denote those cases in which a 'distinct additional clinical entity' occurred during the clinical course of a patient having an index disease. Although the term has recently become very fashionable in psychiatry, its use to indicate the concomitance of two or more psychiatric diagnoses is said to be incorrect because in most cases it is unclear whether the concomitant diagnoses actually reflect the presence of distinct clinical entities or refer to multiple manifestations of a single clinical entity. It has been argued that because "'the use of imprecise language may lead to correspondingly imprecise thinking', this usage of the term 'comorbidity' should probably be avoided".

Due to its artifactual nature, psychiatric comorbidity has been considered as a Kuhnian anomaly leading the DSM to a scientific crisis and a comprehensive review on the matter considers comorbidity as an epistemological challenge to modern psychiatry.