DSM

Behind the U.S. task force recommendation to screen all children and adults for depression.

Robert Spitzer, chair of the DSM-III task force and referred to as "the father of modern psychiatry" in a front-page story on the New...

In a new article for the journal Social Science & Medicine, sociologist Owen Whooley investigates how the DSM-5 creators failed in their attempt to...

From Flipboard: In a recent study on auditory hallucinations, all participants — not just those who had been diagnosed with psychosis — experienced conditioned hallucinations. The study...

From The Chronicle: The practice of pharmaceutical industry payments to academic researchers to help promote their drugs remains widespread. Requiring scientists to disclose their ties...

From The Atlantic: This June, the Supreme Court will make an important decision regarding the role of mental health experts in death penalty cases. The...

I have been immersed in the field of psychiatric diagnosis – and resistance to it – for more than a quarter of a century. In the late 1980s, I was a consultant to two committees appointed by DSM-IV Task Force head Allen Frances to decide what DSM-IV should contain. I resigned from those committees after two years because I was appalled by the way I saw that good scientific research was often being ignored, distorted, or lied about and the way that junk science was being used as though it were of high quality . . . if that suited the aims of those in charge.

The practice of medicine in our country is being swallowed whole by a snake. The snake started with the poor, the black, the brown; the already disenfranchised of the deep south and inner cities many years ago. It was an easy sell to the better-off taxpayers. Who wants to give up money to take care of poor people?

From Critical Psychiatry: The International Society of Psychological and Social Approaches to Psychosis (ISPS) has produced a 'Liverpool Declaration' stating that psychosis needs to be...

From Sapiens: Researchers are increasingly recognizing the role that social and environmental factors, including childhood abuse, stressful events, and poverty, play in the development of...

An international study of college students reveals ubiquitous social and emotional challenges faced by young adults.

From openDemocracy: The distress, boredom, and disillusionment so commonly diagnosed as depression may actually result from the demoralization people experience in consumerist cultures. Large-scale cultural change,...

From Thoughtful Living: The biomedical model of psychiatry, along with the DSM, is deeply flawed and can often be misleading. To improve, mental health services...

-"They argue that the concept of 'schizophrenia' is neither valid, nor useful, and suggest replacing it with more generic concepts such as 'psychosis' or 'madness'."

From The Hill: A group of more than 100 psychologists and mental health professionals marched through the streets of New York on Saturday calling for President...

The U.K.'s Guardian writes today that "the proposal by the American Psychiatric Association to create a new illness – prolonged grief disorder – and...

In this opinion piece for The Chronicle Herald, Dr. A.J. discusses the subjective nature of psychiatric diagnosis and the DSM. Citing research by Paula Kaplan,...

Allen Frances, writing in the Huffington Post, calls the decision in the forthcoming DSM-5 to call grief in the bereaved a disorder as soon as...

As the medical director of a community mental health center, my colleagues look to me for guidance on how to approach the new edition of the DSM. How many should we buy? How much time should be devoted to staff training? This is my answer.

From Critical Psychiatry: Jim van Os, who has argued we should abandon the term "schizophrenia," recently wrote an article in support of a unitary model...

In this piece for the Feminist Current, Tove Happonen argues that the therapy model pathologizes women's responses to systemic injustice, aiming to change their emotional reactions...

"Mixed anxiety-depressive disorder," "attenuated psychosis syndrome," "obsessive-compulsive personality disorder," "antisocial personality disorder," and "nonsuicidal self-injury" were among diagnoses that met with disappointing results in...

In this piece for Vice, Tess McClure describes New Zealand's Mad Pride movement, a movement that seeks to destigmatize, normalize, and celebrate experiences of voice-hearing...

Over 13,000 mental health professionals have signed an open letter from The Society for Humanistic Psychology (Div. 32 of the APA) to the DSM-5...

In the first study of its kind, researchers from Finland found the “most definitive evidence to date” that smoking during pregnancy is associated with the eventual diagnosis of schizophrenia in offspring. After controlling for other potential variables, the study, published ahead of print in The American Journal of Psychiatry, revealed a 38% increased odds of developing symptoms diagnosed as schizophrenia in young adults who were exposed to high levels of nicotine in utero.