Early detection and early intervention approach targets people at-risk stages who are very close to conversion to illness, or patients who have just transited the illness stage and have not, yet, become chronic. Rigorous efforts have been put in for early detection and early intervention in psychiatry. A high-risk population is identified by clinical manifestations that, as per their severity and suffering, do not yet meet the diagnostic criteria of psychiatric disorders. There have been attempts to break through the existing phenotype-based diagnostic system using biomarkers, but researchers have yet to overcome the heterogeneity of the disease. Nowadays, the clinical staging models in psychosis, bipolar, and depressive disorders have been proposed as a heuristic and a practical alternative to this. This model is evolving to integrate various demographic factors, clinical symptoms, cognitive functions, and biomarkers. 

Key words: Early identification; Heterogeneiry; Clinical staging; Biomarkers; Psychiatric disorders