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Mental and substance use disorders account for about 7·4% of the global burden of disease (Whiteford et al., 2013). These mental disorders include various mood disorders such as major depressive disorder, anxiety disorders like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and substance use disorders such as alcohol abuse. A study analysing the results of the World Health Organization (WHO) World Mental Health (WMH) surveys found that post-traumatic stress disorder had one of the strongest associations with the lost human capital caused by individuals days out of role per year (Alonso et al., 2011). Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as its name implies, may develop after being involved in, or witnessing traumatic events (Mind, 2017). These …show more content…

The International Classification of Diseases (ICD), first initiated in Paris, is the official world classification used by health practitioners across the world to record the diagnoses of all patients seen in psychiatric care where official statistics are collected (Tyrer, 2014). The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), is the official classification in the USA used mainly by psychiatrists for clinical diagnosis (Tyrer, 2014). The main differences between these classification systems include: the ICD focusing on primary care and low- and middle-income countries, while the DCM focuses on secondary psychiatric care in high-income countries; the ICD reducing the number of diagnoses with the focus being on clinical utility, while the DSM increases the number of diagnoses with each revision; and the ICD does not depend on operational criteria but instead provides diagnostic descriptions and guidance, while the DSM uses a polythetic system for most conditions which depends on operational criteria (Tyrer, 2014). These differences result in the latest revisions of these classification systems, the proposed ICD-11 and the DSM-5, diagnosing mental disorders like PTSD differently, with the ICD-11 criteria identifying less individuals than the DSM-5 (Hafstad et al., 2017). Worldwide this raises a challenge for the identification of

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