Comprehensive Diagnosis, Ethics and Quality of Life : Special Topic Issue: Psychopathology 1999, Vol. 32, No. 3

Ethics and quality of life are fundamental concepts for exemplary clinical care.

This publication emphasizes on three aspects of diagnosing a psychiatric patient which attract attention increasingly: comprehensiveness, ethical orientation and the assessment of quality of life as part of the patient's perspective.

All these approaches lead away from reductionistic, single-label diagnoses. The papers contained examine and discuss emerging perspectives on diagnostic systems and the place that ethics and quality of life have in them.

Broadly and methodologically innovative approaches to comprehensive diagnosis are discussed, and a current review of developments concerning the relationship between ethics and psychiatric diagnosis is given.

The mutually complementary values of quantitative and qualitative, objective and intuitive, scientific and humanistic approaches are discussed, enriching the diagnostic procedures to describe all that is important in the patient's condition and to facilitate the restoration of health in all its dimensions.