January 16th, 2011 by Dinah Miller, M.D. in Better Health Network, Opinion
No Comments »
I’ve followed in bits and pieces — sometimes for Shrink Rap, sometimes because the issues fill my email inbox, sometimes because there’s no escape. Oh, and lots of the players have familiar names.
In the December 27th issue of Wired magazine, Gary Greenberg writes a comprehensive article on the debates around the revision of the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) upcoming revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) entitled “Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness.” Do read it. Here’s an excerpt:
I recently asked a former president of the APA how he used the DSM in his daily work. He told me his secretary had just asked him for a diagnosis on a patient he’d been seeing for a couple of months so that she could bill the insurance company. “I hadn’t really formulated it,” he told me. He consulted the DSM-IV and concluded that the patient had obsessive-compulsive disorder.
“Did it change the way you treated her?” I asked, noting that he’d worked with her for quite a while without naming what she had.
“No.”
“So what would you say was the value of the diagnosis?”
“I got paid.” Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Shrink Rap*
December 1st, 2010 by GruntDoc in Better Health Network, Health Policy, Humor, News
No Comments »
Via an article in The New York Times entitled “Narcissism No Longer a Psychiatric Disorder”:
Narcissistic personality disorder, characterized by an inflated sense of self-importance and the need for constant attention, has been eliminated from the upcoming manual of mental disorders, which psychiatrists use to diagnose mental illness.
As Charles Zanor reports in today’s Science Times, the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — due out in 2013 and known as D.S.M.-5 — has eliminated five of the 10 personality disorders that are listed in the current edition. The best known of these is narcissistic personality disorder.
So, blogging is normal then? Kinda takes the fun out of it…
*This blog post was originally published at GruntDoc*
July 21st, 2010 by GarySchwitzer in Better Health Network, Health Policy, News, Opinion, Quackery Exposed, Research
No Comments »
There’s a noteworthy column in Psychiatric Times, “Normality Is an Endangered Species: Psychiatric Fads and Overdiagnosis,” by Allen Frances, M.D. He was chair of the task force that worked on the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual — DSM-IV — one edition of the “bible of psychiatry.” He is professor emeritus of psychiatry at Duke University School of Medicine. There’s a lot of common ground between what Dr. Frances writes and what Dr. Daniel Carlat (the subject of an earlier blog posting) writes about. Dr. Frances is concerned about the directions that might be taken in the authoring of DSM-V, now underway.
Excerpts:
“Fads in psychiatric diagnosis come and go and have been with us as long as there has been psychiatry. The fads meet a deeply felt need to explain, or at least to label, what would otherwise be unexplainable human suffering and deviance. In recent years the pace has picked up and false “epidemics” have come in bunches involving an ever-increasing proportion of the population. We are now in the midst of at least 3 such epidemics–of autism, attention deficit, and childhood bipolar disorder. And unless it comes to its senses, DSM5 threatens to provoke several more (hypersexuality, binge eating, mixed anxiety depression, minor neurocognitive, and others). Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Gary Schwitzer's HealthNewsReview Blog*
