The aim of this Course is to take a fresh look at Psychopathology and its place in the curriculum of early career European psychiatrists.
We have put together a programme that combines theoretical, empirical, clinical and therapeutic perspectives.
We assume that the relevance of Psychopathology for Psychiatry is threefold:
- it is the common language that allows psychiatrists to understand each other while talking about patients;
- it is the ground for classification and diagnosis;
- it makes an indispensable contribution to understanding patients’ personal experiences.
For each of these aims, there is a corresponding specialty or sub-area of psychopathology: descriptive psychopathology, the main purpose of which is to systematically study conscious experiences, order and classify them, and create valid and reliable terminology.
Clinical psychopathology, which is a pragmatic tool to bridge relevant symptoms to diagnostic categories, and thus restricting the scope of the clinical investigation to those symptoms that are useful to establish a reliable diagnosis. Structural psychopathology, which looks for a global level of intelligibility, assuming that the manifold of phenomena of a given mental disorder are a meaningful, interconnected whole and not just an aggregation of independent symptoms.
We will specifically develop these issues in the area of major psychoses, including manic-depressive disorder and schizophrenias, with a special focus on two questions:
- How to assess mental phenomena?
- How to write a clinical file
The main topics of the Course will be:
- What is Psychopathology?
- Psychopathology and Assessment in Clinical and Research Settings
- How to write a Clinical File?
- Psychopathology and Diagnosis
- Psychopathology and Drug Prescription
- Psychopathology, Understanding and Medical Psychotherapy
- What are Emotions and what is their Relevance in the Assessment and the Clinics of Mood Disorders?
- Phenomenology of Depressions and Mania
- Phenomenology of Borderline Personality Disorder and Borderline Depression
- Vulnerability to Mood Disorders
- What are Self-Disorders and what is their Relevance in the Assessment and the Clinics of Schizophrenias?
- Phenomenology of Early Schizophrenia and of schizophrenic Delusions and Hallucinations
- Vulnerability to Schizophrenias
- Values in Persons with Schizophrenia
