Summary of the qualitative criticisms made during the ICD-10 field trial and remarks on the German translation of ICD-10.

The 1987 draft of ICD-10 presents many new aspects of the psychiatric diagnostic evaluation. Some were readily accepted by the participants of the field study, including: the purely descriptive approach with the abautonment of many theoretical concepts; the more operationalized descriptions of the diagnoses; similarity in structure and terms to DSM-III-R. Others proved controversial: extension of the term dementia to include even mild and moderately severe organic psychosyndromes; inclusion of all forms of depression in one chapter, and their subdivisioning only by severity; different time criteria for the diagnosis of schizophrenia in DSM-III-R (6 months) and ICD-10 (1 month). Considerable criticism was levelled at the overly long and often tediously formulated text, and the lack of didactic organisation. A number of examples of translation difficulties are given, and the differences between a too literal and a technically correct equivalent translation disu-used.