In this piece for Psychology Today, Dr. Jonathan D. Raskin lists 10 facts about the current version of the International Classification of Diseases, which is the diagnostic manual of the World Health Organization.
“Like the DSM-5, the ICD-10 adheres to a medical model—meaning that it organizes symptoms that tend to co-occur into categories and then treats these categories as disorders people ‘have.’ That is, even if it doesn’t take a formal position on how best to remedy the disorders it contains, the ICD-10 views presenting problems as dysfunctions inside of people that are most efficiently grouped into distinguishable disease entities. This sort of medical model has dominated practice for a long time and is typically taken for granted, though it certainly is not the only way of conceptualizing human distress.”
