Psychiatric Diagnosis And The DSM-5 Controversy
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*
