Background: An ongoing positive revolution advocates a new approach to the individual differences in human emotions, cognitions, and behavior that cause distress and impair functioning. This revolution endorses the long-proposed, but still unrealized rejection of the medical model, which attributes psychological problems to a sick brain or mind. In addition, it advocates replacing the binary diagnoses used in ICD and DSM, which assume a clear discontinuity between "normal" and "abnormal" functioning, with continuous dimensions of psychological problems.
Method: Selective literature review.
Results and discussion: Seven strong reasons are provided for adopting a dimensional approach.
Keywords: dimensional approach; stigma; taxonomy.
© 2022 The Authors. JCPP Advances published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health.