Semiotic perspective of psychiatric diagnosis

Abstract

Psychiatric diagnostics can be meaningfully approached from the viewpoint of such concepts as normality of presented behavioral symptoms and signs, sincerity of the representation modality, and pathology of the patient’s internal state. The concepts form the basis for epistemological propositions that allow for a structured differential description of several psychiatric phenomena — such as health, mental illness, clinical deception, Munchausen syndrome, malingering, and personality disorders — along with a range of non-medical experiences. Placing a vast variety of clinical presentations in the new conceptual framework makes possible the explicit semiotic modeling of diagnostic decisions that medicine and psychiatry have the mandate to make.