
DSM’s future adds biomarkers and context, yet validity remains unresolved—are diagnoses real? Critics urge an evidence-based overhaul.

Dr Ruffalo is an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Central Florida College of Medicine in Orlando, Florida, and adjunct assistant professor of psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston, Massachusetts. He currently serves as director of psychotherapy training at the UCF/HCA Orlando Psychiatry Residency Program and is the Founding Editor of The Carlat Psychotherapy Report. He is a psychotherapist in private practice in Tampa, Florida.

DSM’s future adds biomarkers and context, yet validity remains unresolved—are diagnoses real? Critics urge an evidence-based overhaul.

Explore how integrated psychotherapy—CBTp, family support, and humane alliance—reduces relapse and restores meaning beyond medication in schizophrenia.

Renaming borderline personality disorder fails to address the condition's complexity; keeping the term preserves key clinical meaning, including structural traits and stress-related psychotic symptoms.

Experts discuss diagnostic validators and the DSM.

This article unpacks narcissistic personality disorder, from grandiose fantasies to vulnerable traits, and explains why ‘narcissist’ is often misused online.

Chatbots feel empathic, raising psychiatry, ethics, and legal questions about consciousness and rights.

Experts urge emotional intelligence stress tests to ensure safer conversations with chatbots.


Mark Ruffalo introduces the PRiSM diagnostic tool, enhancing diagnosis clarity by bridging categorical and dimensional approaches in psychopathology.

American psychiatry struggles with understanding psychopathology, emphasizing the need to return to its roots for accurate diagnosis and effective treatment.

Explore the complexities of mental illness, its definitions, and the limitations of current psychiatric diagnosis in understanding true psychopathology.

Explore the innovative PRiSM diagnostic tool, bridging categorical and dimensional approaches to enhance psychiatric diagnosis and treatment. Then submit your experiences for the chance to win publication and $500.

American psychiatry reexamines its roots in psychopathology, challenging DSM's validity and advocating for a return to understanding mental illness.

The strong emphasis on neuroscience in the 1990s and early 2000s is now giving way to a new psychiatric pluralism, one that increasingly views psychotherapy as real treatment and psychosocial factors as fundamental to understanding the causes and basic nature of psychopathology.

Borderline personality disorder represents 10% to 25% of the patients who would be considered to have borderline personality organization. Explore the complexities of its stigma and effective treatment strategies.

Discover the innovative Borderline Personality Disorder Inventory (BPD-I™), a psychodynamically-informed tool for assessing BPD symptoms effectively.

Are you ready to put the Psychopathology Refracted into 7 Modalities (PRiSM) Scale into practice? Learn more here.

A final argument on psychiatric diagnoses.

Is the complex posttraumatic stress disorder diagnosis being used to avoid the diagnosis of borderline personality disorder?

It is simply not the case that the DSM diagnostic categories are defined only by symptoms...

Diagnostic criteria are not the same as the disorders they identify.

Not knowing the pathophysiology of a condition does not mean we have no causal explanation of the patient’s suffering and incapacity.

What role does countertransference play in physician-assisted suicide? Learn more here.

Here are 5 reasons why we need to study the history of psychiatry.

Here's a look at the characteristic methods of communication among patients with BPD.

Given the paradoxical nature of borderline personality disorder, double bind communication appears to be a common method of engagement which ultimately serves only self-defeating purposes.

Is adult ADHD validated by research? These authors think not.

"The history of psychiatry is a history of fads in theory, diagnosis, and treatment. Such rapid shifts in conceptualization—such as the emergence of the concept of adult ADHD—almost always warrant informed critical examination."

Although psychotherapy is a core treatment in psychiatry, it is currently underutilized in the management of schizophrenia.

A frequent criticism of psychiatry: psychiatrists do not learn, practice, or value psychotherapy. Is it true?

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