Glossary / History of psychiatry
Feighner criteria
Diagnostic criteria for research published in 1972 by psychiatrists at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. They spelled out which symptoms, how many and for how long, had to be present for a diagnosis, and which cases were excluded.
From the 1950s, when psychoanalysis dominated, Robins, Guze and their colleagues at Washington University had kept to classifying illness by following its course. In 1972 they published the criteria with the resident John Feighner as first author[1].
Spitzer and colleagues built the Research Diagnostic Criteria on them, and those became central to DSM-III in 1980[1]. DSM-III has been described as moving the centre of psychiatry towards a research-based medical model[2].
Related terms
- Research Diagnostic CriteriaDiagnostic criteria for research in psychiatry, built by Spitzer and colleagues on the Feighner criteria. They became central to DSM-III in 1980.
- DSM-IIIThe third edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published in 1980. It gave each disorder a list of diagnostic criteria, so that different clinicians would be more likely to reach the same diagnosis.