Patient submissions to third and final DSM-5 stakeholder review
June 14, 2012
Patient submissions to third and final DSM-5 stakeholder review
Post #182 Shortlink: http://wp.me/pKrrB-2f5
This third and final stakeholder review is scheduled to close on Friday. If an extension is announced I will update.
As with the two previous draft reviews, in 2010 and 2011, I am collating copies of submissions on these pages.
If you have submitted to the Somatic Symptom Disorder proposals or are a professional, professional body or advocacy organization that has submitted a general response which includes reference to the Somatic Symptom Disorder proposals I would be pleased to receive a copy for publication on this site. Submissions will be published subject to review and posted in PDF format if more than a few pages long.
The most recent submission received is from “US patient 1”. This is a detailed response which I am publishing in both text and PDF format. (Note that as far as I can see submissions can only be uploaded to the DSM-5 Development site using the RT or html text editor and not as file attachments.)
Submission from US patient 1 to J 00 SSD and J 02 Conversion Disorder (FNSD)
Full text in PDF:
DSM-5 submission
To: DSM-5 Task Force, Somatic Symptom Disorders Work Group
From: _______
Re: Response on the Proposals for Somatic Symptom Disorder and Conversion Disorder
Date: June 12, 2012The DSM-5 Task Force has thus far failed to address the conceptual and practical problems inherent in DSM-IV somatoform disease constructs. Specifically, its proposals for Somatic Symptom Disorder and Conversion Disorder are actually more flawed than their equivalents in DSM-IV. The criteria for these two diagnoses rely excessively upon purely subjective judgments by clinicians and on the extent of a clinician’s awareness of known diseases, and lack the specificity required of valid diagnostic constructs.
To understand just how strongly subjectivity of clinical interpretation can impact diagnostic outcome when using somatoform disorder criteria on a disease with unknown etiology, it is instructive to consider in some detail Johnson et al’s “Assessing Somatization Disorder in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome”1, a study on the reliability of DSM-III-R somatization disorder (SD) criteria and related instruments when applied to patients with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). As the DSM-III-R SD diagnostic construct was less subjective and had greater specificity in terms of symptom presentation than the proposed SSD criteria, a careful examination of its flaws, as demonstrated by this study, offers a sobering perspective on real world application of SSD criteria.
CFS is a somatic disease of unestablished etiology; the United States Centers for Disease Control has stated that “Research shows that CFS is not a form of psychiatric illness” and that an essential criterion for its diagnosis is “severe chronic fatigue of 6 months or longer that is not explained by any medical or psychiatric diagnosis”. Nevertheless, in spite of such evidence, an opinion persists in the medical community that CFS is in some way a psychosomatic illness, an opinion which can easily influence clinicians in their diagnoses of patients who satisfy CFS criteria. Thus, as Johnson et al noted: “Whether or not symptoms of CFS are considered medically caused will strongly affect the incidence of SD within the CFS population…If the examiner recognizes that the patient’s CFS symptoms indicate a physical illness, the diagnosis of SD may not be made. Conversely, if the examiner does not consider CFS a medical illness, the patient’s symptom endorsement may lead to the diagnosis of SD.”
To begin with, Johnson et al discussed the problems with the DSM-III-R criteria for somatization disorder:
“According to DSM-III-R .. the diagnosis of somatization disorder (SD) requires a person to present with at least 13 symptoms for which no significant organic pathology can be found. The symptoms must have caused the person to take medication, to see a physician, or to have altered her/his lifestyle. The disorder begins before the age of 30 and has a chronic but fluctuating course. However, the diagnosis of SD is extremely problematic in terms of its validity because it involves a series of judgments that can be arbitrary and subjective […] Specifically, the interviewer must decide if the symptom reported is attributable to an identifiable medical illness. Although such judgments are extremely difficult to make uniformly, the influence of bias introduced by the interviewer’s orientation on the prevalence of SD has not been adequately addressed.”
They noted the high variation between the estimates of SD prevalence in CFS patient cohorts reported by previous studies and concluded that it was “in itself indicative of the problem in defining SD”. They further pointed out that “The difficulty in distinguishing among somatic symptoms that are psychiatric vs. organic in origin can result in overdiagnosis of SD in medical illness, particularly chronic illness”, as they had observed in several studies by other authors on somatization in CFS.
dx revision watch 