The aim of this Course is to take a fresh look at Psychopathology and its place in the curriculum of early career European psychiatrists.
We have put together a programme that combines theoretical, empirical, clinical and therapeutic perspectives.
We assume that the relevance of Psychopathology for Psychiatry is threefold:

• it is the common language that allows psychiatrists to understand each other while talking about patients;
• it is the ground for classification and diagnosis;
• it makes an indispensable contribution to understanding patients’ personal experiences.

For each of these aims, there is a corresponding specialty or sub-area of psychopathology: descriptive psychopathology, the main purpose of which is to systematically study conscious experiences, order and classify them, and create valid and reliable terminology.
Clinical psychopathology, which is a pragmatic tool to bridge relevant symptoms to diagnostic categories, and thus restricting the scope of the clinical investigation to those symptoms that are useful to establish a reliable diagnosis. Structural psychopathology, which looks for a global level of intelligibility, assuming that the manifold of phenomena of a given mental disorder are a meaningful, interconnected whole and not just an aggregation of independent symptoms.
We will specifically develop these issues in the area of major psychoses, including manic-depressive disorder and schizophrenias, with a special focus on two questions:

• How to assess mental phenomena?
• How to write a clinical file

The main topics of the Course will be:

• What is Psychopathology?
• Psychopathology and Assessment in Clinical and Research Settings
• How to write a Clinical File?
• Psychopathology and Diagnosis
• Psychopathology and Drug Prescription
• Psychopathology, Understanding and Medical Psychotherapy
• What are Emotions and what is their Relevance in the Assessment and the Clinics of Mood Disorders?
• Phenomenology of Depressions and Mania
• Phenomenology of Borderline Personality Disorder and Borderline Depression
• Vulnerability to Mood Disorders
• What are Self-Disorders and what is their Relevance in the Assessment and the Clinics of Schizophrenias?
• Phenomenology of Early Schizophrenia and of schizophrenic Delusions and Hallucinations
• Vulnerability to Schizophrenias
• Values in Persons with Schizophrenia