Ontology of psychiatric conditions: taxometrics

Abstract

Most psychiatric conditions aren’t a binary like the flu, where you either have it or you don’t. They’re a continuum, like being rich, where some people are richer than others, all the way up to millionaires and billionaires, but there’s no simple way of dividing the world into two clearly-separated “rich” and “non-rich” groups. This means the psychiatric project of either diagnosing or not-diagnosing someone with a condition is at best a hack and at worst actively confusing. Instead of fretting about whether you do or don’t qualify for a diagnosis, you should assess how much a certain set of symptoms affect your functioning.