Understanding the Emotional Disorders

Improving the measurement of symptoms of emotional disorders has been an important goal of mental health research. In direct response to this need the Expanded Version of the Inventory of Depression and Anxiety Symptoms (IDAS-II) was developed to assess symptom dimensions underlying psychological disorders. Unlike other scales that serve as screening instruments used for diagnostic purposes the IDAS-II is not closely tethered to the <em>Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders </em>(DSM); rather its scales cut across DSM boundaries to examine psychopathology in a dimensional rather than a categorical way. Developed by authors David Watson and Michael O'Hara the IDAS-II has broad implications for our understanding of psychopathology. <p/><em>Understanding the Emotional Disorders</em> is the first manual for how to use the IDAS-II and examines important replicable symptom dimensions contained within five adjacent diagnostic classes in the DSM-5: depressive disorders bipolar and related disorders anxiety disorders obsessive-compulsive and related disorders and trauma- and stressor-related disorders. It reviews problems and limitations associated with traditional diagnosis-based approaches to studying psychopathology and establishes the theoretical and clinical value of analyzing specific types of symptoms within the emotional disorders. It demonstrates that several of these disorders contain multiple symptom dimensions that clearly can be differentiated from one another. Moreover these symptom dimensions are highly robust and generalizable and can be identified in multiple types of data including self-ratings semi-structured interviews and clinicians' ratings. Furthermore individual symptom dimensions often have strikingly different correlates such as varying levels of criterion validity incremental predictive power and diagnostic specificity. Consequently it is more informative to examine these specific types of symptoms rather than the broader disorders. The book concludes with the development of a more comprehensive symptom-based model that subsumes various forms of psychopathology-including sleep disturbances eating- and weight-related problems personality pathology psychosis/thought disorder and hypochondriasis-beyond the emotional disorders.<br>