Disorders are referred to as “with heirarchy” and “without heirarchy.” Could you please inform me as to what this means?
For every disorder we took into account the organic exclusion criteria (i.e. not due to the direct physiological effects of a substance or a general medical condition). However, for some disorders, in addition to the DSM-III exclusion mentioned above, there are other exclusions. For example in MDD criteria C there has never been a manic episode, a mixed episode or a hyponmanic episode. We refer to this as hierarchy. In other words, the condition is not best accounted for by another disorder. When we apply the hierarchical rules we refer to the disorder as “with hierarchy”. Please refer to the diagnostic documentation (working paper 7) for a description of hierarchical criteria.
