A11 11..11

The presence of paranoid thoughts is not exclusive to clinical disorder; recent data suggest that their prevalence follows an exponential-shaped curve, with many people experiencing a few such thoughts, while a few people experience many such thoughts. Wong et al (pp. 221–229) found that this exponential curve was also evident in their assessment of paranoid thoughts in children, but the frequency of these paranoid thoughts decreased with increasing age. They found similar rates of paranoid thoughts in children in Hong Kong and the UK, who demonstrated higher levels of suspiciousness at school relative to home, and both countries showed strong correlations with anxiety symptoms. However, in the UK suspiciousness at home was strongly linked to aggression. This study of symptoms is an example used to demonstrate the value of psychopathology to psychiatry; an editoral by Stanghellini & Broome (pp. 169–170) makes the point that psychopathology consists of more than the evaluation of symptoms; it also has a person-oriented focus. Taken together, psychopathology describes the person’s experience, in relationship both to themselves and to the world. They make a case for the centrality of psychopathological examination, based on an emphasis of form over content, as the core of psychiatric practice. The importance of this focus on psychopathology and symptoms is made crystal clear in the differences observed in the prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) within the same sample, depending on the classification used – the DSM-5 or the new proposed criteria for ICD-11. Each of these two systems identified a proportion of people with PTSD that was not identified by the other – and thus revealed a significant difference in the prevalence of PTSD as assessed by the different classification systems. O’Donnell et al (pp. 230–235) point out the problems of this discrepancy, particularly for international research on PTSD.