DSM-5 Draft Criteria Available for Public Comment through April 20

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OldPsychDoc

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DSM-5 Draft Criteria Available for Public Comment through April 20


The American Psychiatric Association is seeking your comments on proposed criteria for the fifth edition of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the standard classification of mental disorders used by mental health and other health professionals for diagnostic and research purposes.


Proposed DSM-5 draft criteria will be available for review and comment at http://www.DSM5.org from February 10 to April 20, 2010. Health professionals, mental health consumers and family members are invited to visit the site to review and comment on the draft criteria.



DSM-5 remains a work in progress: following the public comment period, the DSM-5 Task Force and Work Groups will spend two years reviewing and refining proposed criteria based on public comments and the results of field trials, which will be conducted in three phases to test some of the proposed diagnostic criteria in real-world clinical settings.



The release of the final DSM-5 is expected in May 2013.



For more information, visit http://www.DSM5.org.

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I'll be very curious to hear the impressions of DSM-V by our more experienced members...
 
Kind of a pain for this crop of graduating medical students. I'll spend the majority of residency learning DSM-IV.....and then boom DSMV hits near graduation. Hopefully not too many changes.
 
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I haven't gotten to read much on the PDs yet. I did look over the eating DOs since I used to do some work in that field, and the plan is to remove amenorrhea as a criterion for anorexia nervosa which I'm really happy about. That makes the diagnostic more applicable to pre-pubescent girls (wish we didn't need to even think about them in this..), post-menopausal women, and males. Some of the wording of the other criteria were adjusted to be less pejorative. Overall, I was pleased with what I saw.
 
A couple of things struck me as improvements in my quick perusal: Making personality disorders about "levels of personality functioning" in several domains accords with the psychodynamic model of the mind, which talks about "levels of personality organization" along similar dimensions, a la Kernberg. This makes these disorders more of a spectrum, which hopefully will lower the threshold for people who need psychodynamic psychotherapy entering treatment (though it will increase the number of people who are "stigmatized" with a personality disorder diagnosis :scared:). Also, I like moving substance abuse and dependence into a single category with a severity specifier, since this distinction is pretty much about severity. I also like how craving has been added as a diagnostic criterion for addiction. Seems odd that it was never there in the first place.
 
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