James Phillips, MD

Articles by James Phillips, MD

In my previous blog, The Missing Person in the DSM, I questioned whether the DSM diagnostic manual classifies psychiatric disorders or the individuals suffering from diagnostic disorders-Ms Smith’s bipolar disorder, or Ms Smith, a person with bipolar disorder.

In a recent issue of Psychiatric News, members of the DSM-5 Task Force reported on the dimensional measures being considered for DSM-5. These take 2 forms: severity scales for individual disorders, and “cross-cutting” measures that cut across disorders. For this brief piece, I will focus on the latter, the more interesting and controversial of the proposed dimensions.

Any effort to develop a diagnostic manual for world-wide use must grapple with the question of cross-cultural applicability. The description and diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia must work as well in East Timor as in the US or France. In this piece I choose PTSD to show the complexity of the cultural issue for DSM-5.

The limited empirical research evidence supports the impression that practitioners, if they use the manuals at all, use them in a loose, informal manner and are comfortable ignoring diagnostic criteria and making their diagnoses following an informal prototypal pattern.

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