Clinical Staging and Its Potential to Enhance Mental Health Care

Abstract

Over the last two decades application of the clinical staging model in mental health has been advocated to improve diagnosis, intervention, prediction of illness trajectory and, ultimately, outcomes. The model offers a substantive advance for mental health care as it goes beyond traditional fixed categories to incorporate a stepwise continuum to guide much more appropriate treatment planning and prognosis. In this chapter, an overview of this advanced type of clinical staging is provided. With its focus on the continuum of mental illness, and underlying differential trajectories of illness progression that are not well captured by current categorical diagnostic practice, staging addresses th..