The era of diagnosis and its potential consequences: Critical evaluation from a developmental psychopathological perspective. – Martin Wolgast

Psychiatric diagnoses have acquired an increasingly prominent role in how psychological difficulties are understood, communicated, and addressed, not least among children and young people. The presentation asks what happens when diagnostic categories become a dominant framework for understanding psychological distress. From the developmental psychological and developmental psychopathological perspectives, we examine what may be obscured when dynamic, heterogeneous, and context-dependent developmental processes are organized primarily through diagnostic categories, and when diagnoses move from describing patterns of difficulties towards functioning as explanations for them - and what this may mean for understanding developmental pathways, context, and variation among individuals.