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Particularly over the last 5 decades, clinical psychology/psychiatry - or perhaps say abnormal psychology - has undergone significant changes (compare DSM I -V & ICD 1 - 10). In fact, these changes have increased rather than reduced the problems within psychiatry leading up to a scientific crisis. Now, in order to counteract this crisis of ill-defined, over-simplified and increasing number of categories, the author attempts to define dimensions in which to locate an individual's psychological state.
Here, this paper suggests to make use of the following 5 dimensions: A) Learning ability which refers to an individual's ability to obtain, process, retrieve and apply information (with high learning ability at the one end of the scale and learning difficulties at the other). B) Mental health which is concerned with the balance between an individual's resources and the demands placed upon this individual and the perceived balance (e.g. should demands outstrip resources the mental health of this individual will decrease possibly resulting in depression). C) Personality disorders which are the outcome of an individual's maladaptive behaviour (i.e. changes in environment do not motivate an individual to adapt to such changes). D) Brain anomalies whether this should be genetic, acquired through injury and disease or substance abuse (e.g. Korsakoff state). E) Neuro-dysfunction whether permanent (e.g. Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease), chronic (e.g. medical depression) or acute (e.g. intoxication).
It is the claim of this paper that an individual's psychological state can be mapped within these five dimensions and that this system is suitable to replace other systems such as the classification into classical psychoses and neuroses or the ever growing amount of categories within DSM or ICD.
The full paper can be viewed here.
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