Human genetics as an approach to the classification of mental diseases

Abstract

Since 1932, we have experienced steadily growing difficulty in entering several mental diseases properly into Brazilian classification.Among such patterns, there is, for instance, the "chronical hallucinatory delusion" isolated by Roxo, which is paraphrenia-like, but not at all paraphrenia in the classical meaning, and far more common than this very condition. Listing both entities under the same heading, as followed by our national system, resulted in undue overcharge for the proper rubric in Brazilian statistics.Other atypical patterns such as the "mixed psychoses" 4 , could not find a place in our system and had to be forced into the place reserved for one of the principal conditions at play in the given instance. If psychiatrists task were to be construted as one of labeling patients, this handicap would not matter, but no reasonable person would foster such views. The difficulties were still more upsetting when we got acquainted with the several