Hip
Senior Member
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I think we all agree here, @Hip. If you read back over the posts, that is exactly what I and the others were saying.
It did not seem to me that you were, from your comment here:
You seem to be saying that by mixing mental and physical symptoms in the description of a disease, we are contaminating the psychological essence of the mental symptoms.The core idea underlying depression, anxiety etc., is that these are about certain patterns of thinking and/or kinds of feelings. That's what makes them psychological. Somatic complaints are often included in diagnoses or in self-report scales because they seem to frequently accompany those thoughts and feelings. But by including them in definitions and scales, we risk losing the integrity of the original concept - which was psychological - and contaminating them with a measure of something very different.
Similarly, @MeSci says after listing all the physical symptoms of GAD:
Er, where are the mental illnesses in that lot?
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