... insurance companies require a diagnosis. F. Funding for programs. G. Theory development. In striving for a classification system, a number of things have traditionally been sought (see, for example, Sprock & Blashfield, 1983): A. Exhaustive system: the classification system should account for all the types of abnormal behavior that we encounter. A classification system for plants would be of limited use if it had nothing to say about all the plants in your backyard. B. Mutually exclusive categories/Independent dimensions: Your plant classification system should clearly distinguish between plants, even those that are very similar. There should be no doubt which plant this plant is. Likewise, the most powerful classification system for mental disorders will not result in fuzzy categories and uncertainty over whether this person suffers from disorder A or disorder B. [Actually, not all classification systems rely on distinct categories - some base classification on determining where a person falls on various dimensions -all people falling somewhere on each of the dimensions (eg: some possible ...

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