In making a diagnosis, individual psychiatrists inevitably accord differing importance to various features in a patient's history. By regulating the order and number of conditions to be recorded, a multiaxial framework provides for internationally comparable descriptions of mental state. This volume provides the psychiatric sections of ICD-10 in a form that is adapted for ease of use by those dealing with mental disorders in childhood and adolescence. Descriptions have been grouped into axes that have been chosen to provide unambiguous information of maximum clinical usefulness in the greatest number of cases. Building on the popular original framework of four axes, the system has been greatly improved by the inclusion of a new axis for psychosocial situations and by the addition of yet another axis on adaptive level that enables clinicians to code an individual's current level of disability.

1. Introduction M. Rutter; 2. Axis one (clinical psychiatric syndromes); 3. Axis two (specific disorders of psychological development); 4. Axis three (intellectual level); 5. Axis four (medical conditions); 6. Axis 5 (associated abnormal psychosocial situations); 7. Axis 6 (assessment of psychosocial disability).