Education and discussion will be the most powerful ways to mitigate the risks of DSM-5. The more people know about psychiatric diagnosis, the more safe, accurate, and useful it will be.
As most mental health professionals know by now, psychiatry's D-Day is rapidly approaching. DSM-5 is scheduled to be officially released at the American Psychiatric Association meeting. However, there has never been an official treatment manual to complement the diagnostic one.
The intense level of international interest in DSM-5 is a great surprise. Although DSM has become a research standard around the world, it is rarely used by clinicians outside the US and therefore poses a much lesser threat to their patients. So why all the prominent media coverage in countries outside of the US?
What everyone agrees on (except the authors of DSM-III and DSM-IV), is that bereaved people meeting criteria of MDD should be diagnosed with MDD and treated accordingly. Where the confusion occurs is over how to sort out sub-MDD grief from grief with MDD … Read More
The mental health professions have been placed in the position of providing a dangerous fig leaf to cover an unfortunate correctional gap created by fixed sentencing.… Read More
The risk of diluting true bipolar disorders with a fundamentally different disorder is likewise significant, as is the impact through this dilution on... More »
Concerns are raised about DSM-5 revisions in the definition of depression. Many worry that eliminating the bereavement exception in the guidelines for... More »
It has moved PFAMC from the back of the book (where it is not a mental disorder) to front and center in the chapter on Somatic Symptom Disorders... More »
Diagnosing rape as mental disorder is an improper use of psychiatric diagnosis and promotes the abuse of psychiatric commitment to further what would... More »
DSM-5 must emphasize that physical symptoms deserve the respect of a thorough work-up before assuming their cause is psychiatric. And people with... More »
To the membership of the American Psychiatric Association:
Please see the letter I sent to the APA Trustees on April 8, 2010. It contains an urgent plea that the Trustees move immediately to correct the increasingly wayward course of DSM5. The DSM5 Task Force is about to begin a field trial that is a complete mistake for these reasons:
1. It is unnecessarily expensive (a self-financed $2.5 million or more). 2. It is unnecessarily complicated, and will cause additional delays. 3. It fails to address the most important questions that do need answers. 4. It is so poorly designed that the results are very likely to discredit psychiatric diagnosis.
I write directly to you now because this may be a last chance tipping point to save DSM5—and because the APA leadership has so far proven itself consistently unable to provide adequate supervision. You need to be informed of the many crippling DSM5 problems before it will be too late for you to influence your leaders to take the decisive actions needed to solve them.
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