Rethinking a universal framework in the psychiatric symptom-disorder relationship

Research on disparities in health and services should include a critical examination of how social, cultural, and contextual factors affect the connection between symptoms and psychiatric disorders. Systematic differences in this connection by these factors will mean that clinicians using a universalist approach to disorders may make more diagnostic errors for certain patients (e.g., ethnic minorities, the poor). Based on the literature on normative clinical decision-making, this study tests for whether the effect of specific psychiatric disorders on key symptoms is the same for certain groups of the population. The data come from the National Comorbidity Survey. Conditional probabilities of disorders and symptoms, the elements feeding into clinical decision-making, are calculated and tested for equivalence across various racial/ethnic, educational, income, and gender groups. We find some significant differences in the relation of key symptoms to disorders across groups. These findings should encourage testing relativistic frameworks in diagnostic nosology as a step to improve clinical decision-making and reduce diagnostic and treatment disparities in mental health services.