A historical approach of classifications in psychiatry

The question of finding criteria to help classify diseases started arising from the middle of the 19th century onwards. As for mental diseases French (Morel) and German (Kahlbaum, Kraepelin) authors proposed several classifications. From the end of the 19th century the International Bureau of Statistics (Paris) started publishing an International Classification of Diseases, to be reviewed every ten years U. Bertillon). The Health Bureau of the League of Nations (Geneva) continued this work in the years between the two world wars, then the WHO carried on after the second world war for the fifth edition onwards. A specific chapter V (F) was devoted to mental illness. Several national classifications have been revised and modified to establish a concordance with the successive editions of the ICD especially, regarding the area of child psychiatry, the French Classification of Child and Adolescent Mental Diseases in the 2010 version. (C) 2011 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.