Diagnostic variability for schizophrenia and major depression in a large public mental health care system dataset.

Administrative datasets can provide information about mental health treatment in real world settings; however, an important limitation in using these datasets is the uncertainty regarding psychiatric diagnosis. To better understand the psychiatric diagnoses, we investigated the diagnostic variability of schizophrenia and major depression in a large public mental health system. Using schizophrenia and major depression as the two comparison diagnoses, we compared the variability of diagnoses assigned to patients with one recorded diagnosis of schizophrenia or major depression.