In the revision of the International Classification of Mental Disorders (currently 10th revision, hence ICD-10), an international scientific partnership network group was founded by the World Health Organisation (Chair: N. Sartorius, Geneva) in order to review the international scientific evidence of putative significance for the revision of ICD-10 in different language areas. The group of German-speaking countries was founded during the annual congress of the German Society of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Nervous Diseases in 2007. The core group consists of representatives from Austria, Germany, Switzerland and representatives of other German-speaking countries.

A major task of the German-speaking group was to design and test an international survey questionnaire addressing the perceived need for changes to the classification criteria in ICD-10 for mental disorders, the scientific rationale for such proposals, and a general assessment of the foodnes of fit with which the current classification criteria represent the respective mental disorders. The survey was started in August 2008 and results will be presented in this symposium.

The results of and experiences with this questionnaire are expected to influence the questionnaires to be distributed in other language areas, allowing for regional or national differences to be reflected, but also allowing a comparison with previous editions used when ICD-10 was developed. Taken together, the questionnaire is expected to yield insights into the perceived need to adjust ICD-11 to comply with new scientific evidence, but also with practical clinical experiences with its predecessors.