Psychiatric disorders in childhood can only be diagnosed with diagnostic criteria that address the child's behavior. However, the diagnosis would ultimately prove meaningless unless the understanding of the psychopathology behind the criteria is shared by clinicians, because otherwise behaviors not originally targeted by the description of the diagnostic criteria would be erroneously seen as meeting a diagnostic criterion, i.e. behaviors outside the target of the diagnostic criteria would be included in evaluation of a disorder. Overdiagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorders should be avoided so that it will not repeat the same mistake of Minimal Brain Dysfunction.
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