DSM

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

Jeffrey Lieberman, incoming president of the APA, responds to criticism of the DSM and psychiatry, saying "it’s important to understand the difference between thoughtful,...

Researcher Dr. Silke Schwarz highlights how Western psychology’s construction of individual resilience deflects emphasized individual pathology and deflects efforts at structural change.

A new study on the depression symptoms of over three-thousand patients challenges the criteria used for diagnosing major depression with the latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5). Current diagnostic systems are based on an assumption that the symptoms of depression point to a common underlying “illness," but research suggests that this framework may be outdated and oversimplified.

When Thomas Szasz’s name comes up in debates over defining mental illness, it is fairly common to hear people say something along the lines of, “Well, he made some good points, but he was just too extreme.” Yet I am struck by how conversations about DSM-5, being released this month, make the crisp arguments Szasz consistently offered for 50 years just as timely as ever. I’d even go so far as to suggest that a large number of counselors, psychologists, social workers, and psychiatrists pretty much agree with the main tenets of Szasz’s argument, despite their ongoing disclaimers.

Whether it’s the Nurtured Heart Approach, or any other method that’s truly up to the task, we need these effective strategies and ways of thinking to be more widespread so we can lessen the pitfalls of the medical model’s limited prospective which has no idea of how to turn intense into immensely great.

Researchers offer a critical take on the inclusion of the Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder in the DSM-V.

‘I’m severely depressed.’ These were the words that Donesha*, a 35 year-old African American woman repeatedly uttered to me.

A discussion of the role of epistemic injustice in the experiences of patients diagnosed with psychiatric disorders.

You never know what you’re going to accomplish when you start something. Who could have predicted that Tom Insel and NIMH would throw the APA and the DSM under the bus? My guess is that two factors played a big part in NIMH’s decision. First, the unceasing barrage of criticism directed at the DSM – its lack of construct validity; its declining inter-rater reliability – had damaged its credibility beyond repair. On top of that, thirty years of DSM-based research had produced no biomarkers.

Psychiatrist and author Allen J. Frances, former chair of the DSM-IV task force, outlines why he thinks the DSM-V will lead to millions of...

Researchers from Australia and the UK found that people with a schizophrenia diagnosis almost four times more likely than controls to have a history of...

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

Psychologists and people with experience of psychotic symptoms publish a report on new ways of understanding psychosis.

From GoodTherapy.org: Although not currently listed in the DSM, the diagnosis of complex post-traumatic stress (C-PTSD) has gained widespread acceptance in the mental health community. The...

Tension mounts across the ideological divide as D-Day (DSM-5 Day) approaches. The APA has powerful allies on its side. President Obama has just launched Decade of the Brain 2 with the announcement two weeks ago that heralds the arrival of BRAIN ( Brain Research through Advances in Innovative Neurotechnologies). If that’s not enough, those who believe that science will ultimately explain madness can always rely on the media to fawn at their feet.

In "The Order of Things", Michel Foucault, the great French philosopher cites a ‘certain Chinese encyclopedia’ that notes ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’.

A study from Lisa Cosgrove at Harvard's Safra Center for Ethics of potential conflicts of interest among DSM-5 committee members, investigators of new DSM-5 diagnoses,...

New research demonstrates that children diagnosed with ADHD at younger ages are more likely than those diagnosed later to receive multiple medications within five years of their diagnosis.

Article from Wired magazine in 2010 about Allen Frances, lead editor of the DSM-IV, and his criticism of both the DSM-IV and the upcoming DSM-5. Article → 

The International DSM-5 Response Committee, sponsored by Division 32 of the American Psychological Association — the Society for Humanistic Psychology — now has an online petition against the DSM-5.  This is a truly international effort. Please support the petition by signing it at http://dsm5response.com

In a continuing series, Scientific American analyzes the "Trouble at the Heart of Psychiatry's Revised Rule Book." Article →  Part 1: Psychiatrists Are About to Shift...

A new study investigating fifteen years of patient records at a Midwestern hospital found that psychiatrists almost always responded to patient complaints about their relationships by prescribing antidepressants, despite the fact that these complaints had little to do with the DSM criteria for depression. The study’s lead author, Jonathan Metzl, a professor of Sociology and Medicine, Health and Society at Vanderbilt, suggests that after the decision in 1974 to remove homosexuality from the DSM, psychiatry continued to enforce socially accepted forms of relationships through the prescription of antidepressants.

"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...

The type of diagnostic assessment used in research settings, either fully structured or semi-structured interview, may affect which participants in receive a diagnosis of major depression.