National Institute of Mental Health Takes on the DSM

UPDATE
Mental Health Researchers Reject Psychiatry’s New Diagnostic ‘Bible’
TIME
By Maia Szalavitz
May 07, 2013

Just weeks before psychiatry’s new diagnostic “bible”—the DSM 5— is set to be released, the world’s major funder of mental health research has announced that it will not use the new diagnostic system to guide its scientific program, a change some observers have called “a cataclysm” and “potentially seismic.” Dr. Thomas Insel, the director of the National Institute on Mental Health, said in a blog post last week that “NIMH will be re-orienting its research away from DSM categories.”

The change will not immediately affect patients. But in the long run, it could completely redefine mental health conditions and developmental disorders. All of the current categories — from autism to schizophrenia — could be replaced by genetic, biochemical or brain-network labeled classifications. Psychiatrists, who are already reeling from the conflict-filled birth of the fifth edition of the Diagnostical and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, are feeling whipsawed.

“I look at the data and I’m concerned,” says Insel. “I don’t see a reduction in the rate of suicide or prevalence of mental illness or any measure of morbidity. I see it in other areas of medicine and I don’t see it for mental illness. That was the basis for my comment that people with mental illness deserve better.” Adds Hollander, “There’s been a huge gap between some of our basic science information and our ability to develop new treatments because those don’t necessarily map onto DSM diagnoses.”
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But will they also look at the different types of PTSD based on cause of the trauma? There is a huge difference between the type of PTSD combat veterans and law enforcement end up with from what someone surviving a natural disaster. A different type of PTSD that firefighters and emergency responders end up with as well.

National Institute of Mental Health Takes on the DSM
By LINDA HATCH, PHD


A week ago the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) published its intention to work towards and devote research funding to a new system for mental health diagnoses as an alternative to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) published by the American Psychiatric Association. The various incarnations of the DSM have been dubbed the “gold standard” of diagnostic criteria for mental disorders and have provided a common framework for practitioners, researchers and insurers to relate to.

The trouble is that the DSM has never been any good as a basis for understanding and treating mental disorders because it is built, as the NIMH announcement says, out of collections of symptoms rather than identifiable or understandable disorders.
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