The Use of the Diagnostic Criteria for Psychosomatic Research in Substance Use Disorder Patients

Chaturvedi and Goswami have reported on the useful clinical information that may derive from the use of the Diagnostic Criteria for Psychosomatic Research (DCPR) in a psychiatric setting. It has also been widely accepted that DCPR, being based on a clinimetric approach, allows a more sophisticated qualitative assessment of patients than the dimensional DSM checklist of symptoms. This means that DCPR measures symptoms, physical signs, and other clinical phenomena (e.g. type, severity and sequence of symptoms) and, as suggested by macroanalysis, it diagnoses syndromes and/or disorders that can be organized according to a hierarchical configuration on the basis of where treatment should commence in the first place. Recently, macroanalysis has been proposed for the assessment of substance use disorder (SUD) subjects, and DCPR has been hypothesized as possible predictors of cooccurrent psychiatric disorders in such a clinical population. In this framework, we used both DSM-IV and DCPR criteria in a sample of substance abuse outpatients to verify if DCPR might expand the psychological assessment in SUD settings.