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Psychiatric symptoms have in some ways changed since Freud's day.

There is a clinical distinction between symptoms and signs.

Simply suppressing symptoms can sometimes make it more difficult to discern their potentially helpful message.

In the technical language of clinicians, when speaking of the patient's suffering or discomfort, we traditionally make a distinction between "signs" and "symptoms." Signs are objective indications or expressions of the condition or illness that can be observed and quantified by the clinician and others, whereas symptoms are defined as those subjective experiences and complaints that are reported directly by the patient and are more difficult to quantify. For instance, depression can be diagnosed both on the basis of the person's symptoms—low mood, lack of energy, despair, anhedonia, hopelessness, suicidal ideation, etc.—as well as their presenting signs: sad facial expression, crying, slowed speech, or psychomotor activity, insomnia or hypersomnia, disheveled appearance, etc.

Generically speaking, symptoms are just that—symptoms—manifestations or expressions of some psychological, emotional, spiritual, philosophical, or sometimes physiological or neurological condition, conflict, imbalance, mistaken attitude, traumatic experience, or distorted core belief. Most popular psychotherapies today tend to be symptom-focused, meaning they take the sign or symptom, such as anxiety, depression, mania, or substance abuse, at face value and seek to suppress or eliminate it as rapidly as........

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