Читать книгу Developmental Psychopathology - Группа авторов - Страница 24

We hope it is now evident that the major approaches to classification and diagnosis across history serve important purposes but also suffer from substantial weaknesses. In the next chapter, we will describe the developmental psychopathology approach to conceptualizing psychopathology. Developmental psychopathology (DP) means exactly what its name suggests: it is the study of psychological or mental disorders (psychopathology) from a developmental or lifespan perspective. Many features of the DP approach make it a superior alternative to understanding mental illness, particularly in children and adolescents. Briefly, it heavily emphasizes understanding normal development in order to better understand abnormal functioning, making it a dimensional approach to understanding psychopathology. It is also not a classification or diagnostic system per se. Therefore, similar to RDoC, it is not constrained by diagnostic labels or categories but can be used to study these constructs if desired. Also, like the RDoC initiative, and unlike statistical models of psychopathology like HiTOP, a DP approach to studying mental illness examines mechanisms underlying symptomology, rather than the phenotype alone. Finally, unlike all the models and approaches previously described, the DP approach emphasizes and systematically investigates developmental, individual, and environmental risk and protective factors in the etiology of all mental illness. This is particularly critical to understanding childhood and adolescent psychopathology.