Allen Frances, MD

DSM-5 has moved a section called “Psychological Factors Affecting Medical Condition (PFAMC) from the of the book (where it is not a mental disorder) to front and center in the chapter on Somatic Symptom Disorders (where now it will be a mental disorder).

Diagnosing rape as mental disorder is an improper use of psychiatric diagnosis and promotes the abuse of psychiatric commitment to further what would otherwise be an unconstitutional form of preventive detention.

DSM-5 must emphasize that physical symptoms deserve the respect of a thorough work-up before assuming their cause is psychiatric. And people with defined medical illnesses should not be casually mislabeled as also mentally ill just because they are upset about being sick.

In this psychiatrist's opinion, the changes in the newly approved DSM-5 loosen diagnosis and threaten to turn our current diagnostic inflation into diagnostic hyperinflation.

The DSM-5 leadership is trying to put a brave face on its badly failed first stage of field testing and has offered no excuse or explanation for canceling its second and most crucial quality control stage. This field testing fiasco erases whatever was left of the credibility of DSM-5 and APA.

A recent article reports that doctors are prescribing stimulant drugs to compensate for the bad schools their child patients have to attend. Rates of ADHD have tripled in the last 15 years—precisely because many kids are being diagnosed with fake ADHD to make them eligible for medications and/or extra school services.

James Dao reports in the New York Times that the military is considering 2 steps to reduce its startling rate of active duty suicides—which is approaching an unacceptable one suicide every day. Both measures are completely sensible, but neither goes nearly far enough.

Improving our kids performance in school won't come from some vague, quixotic psychological fix. It requires they have better lives and better schools and that means us becoming a fairer society.

With understandable urgency, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has made suicide one of his top priorities, instructing commanders at all levels to feel acutely accountable for it. The numbers are startling. On average 1 active duty soldier is killing himself each day--twice the number of combat deaths and twice the civilian rate.

Big Pharma has hijacked the practice of medicine, using its enormous profits to unduly influence physicians, physician groups, academics, consumer advocacy groups, the Internet, the press, and the government. The cash-strapped FDA is beholden to industry for funding. And it gets worse.