Descriptive psychopathology: Is there a common language?

Abstract

We elaborated a review of some of the main books of descriptive psychopathology, Brazilian and international ones, with the objective of examining if there is uniformity among the various authors about concepts and terminology. We observed that there is not truly a common language: some concepts are used by some authors but are ignored by others; a same term is utilized with different meanings; and a same concept is assigned by different terms. Here some points of divergence among the various authors are presented and discussed.