Comments on: Of manuals and madness, the fight rolls on

By: rita

rita — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 09:53:08 +0000

“The danger is not so much that the DSM will become ridiculous, but that it will become irrelevant.”
- or both.

By: psicoseando

psicoseando — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 08:56:44 +0000

As a licensed clinical psychologist in Spain, I should remind of the fact that DSM is also widely used around here. But as DSM is about psychopathology, it desn¬¥t come to be “owned” just by psychiatrists. Anyhow, the very rare presence of psychologists (just 1) in DSM-V Task Force, plus overpresence of industry ties, disease-model, and so on, is going to end up making us reject it as a more flawed ideological weapon than it already is. So less chance to proper communication among diverse professionals of mental health. I agree with Neuroskeptic that I find myself wishing hard they screw up (maybe weird, but definitely liberating at this point).

By: Neuroskeptic

Neuroskeptic — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 23:35:54 +0000

I think one of the best things that could happen to psychiatry right now would be for DSM-V to come out and be so flawed that it’s no longer seen as a bible by anybody.
The DSM was originally meant to be a tool for allowing researchers and clinicians to better understand mental illness but in fact it has become a license to not understand mental illness, rather, to just learn the DSM & learn which drugs to hand out according to the diagnosis.
Loads of people are saying that kind of thing nowadays, but the problem is that DSM-IV is still the “gold standard”.
If DSM-V came out, was widely mocked, and people were therefore forced to actually think about psychiatric illness again, I’d be very happy.
So I’m genuinely hoping that the DSM-V committee continue to screw up as they currently are. It would be a tradgety if they backslid and we end up with a grudgingly accepted DSM-IV-2.0.

By: Steindor J. Erlingsson

Steindor J. Erlingsson — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 22:14:28 +0000

In light of the current debate it is interesting to look at a comment that Allen Frances and Helen Egger made in a paper in 1999, where they argued that “we are at the epicycle stage of psychiatry where astronomy was before Copernicus and biology before Darwin. Our inelegant and complex current descriptive system will undoubtedly be replaced by … simpler, more elegant models.”