DSM-5 Round up: April #1
April 1, 2013
DSM-5 Round up: April #1
Post #231 Shortlink: http://wp.me/pKrrB-2In
New York Post
Do 1 in 5 NYC preteens really suffer a mental woe? A psychiatry expert argues we’re overdiagnosing —and overmedicating — our kids
Allen Frances MD | March 30, 2013
Last week, The Post reported that more than 145,000 city children struggle with mental illness or other emotional problems. That estimate, courtesy of New York’s Health Department, equals an amazing 1 in 5 kids. Could that possibly be true?
BBC Radio 4
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01rl1q8
Medicalising Grief
Will the book that classifies mental illness lead to the medicalisation of grief?
Presented by Matthew Hill. Featuring Drs Jerome Wakefield, Lisa Cosgrove, Allen Frances (Chaired the Task Force for DSM-IV), Joanne Cacciatore and Gary Greenberg.
Available to listen again for the next 7 days online.
Counseling Today ACA podcasts help counselors prepare for DSM-5
Heather Rudow | March 27, 2013
Rebecca Daniel-Burke, ACA’s [American Counseling Association]director of professional projects and staff liaison to ACA’s DSM-5 Task Force, hosts the podcast series, which offers counselors a way to prepare for and understand potential changes. Daniel-Burke spoke with K. Dayle Jones for the first, 38-minute podcast, and Jason King for the second, which is 52 minutes long and available for CE credit…
The New York Times invited readers to respond for a dialogue about psychiatric diagnoses and the forthcoming DSM-5. The dialogue was initiated by a letter from Ronald Pies, which concludes “‘Diagnosis’ means knowing the difference between one condition and another. For many patients, learning the name of their disorder may relieve years of anxious uncertainty. So long as diagnosis is carried out carefully and respectfully, it may be eminently humanizing. Indeed, diagnosis remains the gateway to psychiatry’s pre-eminent goal of relieving the patient’s suffering.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/20/opinion/invitation-to-a-dialogue-psychiatric-diagnoses.html
Ronald Pies
Controversy surrounding the soon-to-be-released fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM-5 — often called “psychiatry’s bible” — has cast a harsh light on psychiatric diagnosis. For psychiatry’s more radical critics, psychiatric diagnoses are merely “myths” or “socially constructed labels.” But even many who accept the reality of, say, major depression argue that current psychiatric diagnoses often “stigmatize” or “dehumanize” people struggling with ordinary grief, stress or anxiety…
Published responses:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/24/opinion/sunday/sunday-dialogue-defining-mental-illness.html
Letters
Sunday Dialogue: Defining Mental Illness
Response to Letters from Ronald Pies via Psychiatric Times
http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/blog/pies/content/article/10168/2135248
Diagnosis and its Discontents: The DSM Debate Continues
Ronald W. Pies, MD | 29 March 2013
Dr Pies is Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of Psychiatric Times, and a professor in the psychiatry departments of SUNY Upstate Medical University and Tufts University School of Medicine. He is the author of The Judaic Foundations of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy; a collection of short stories, Ziprin’s Ghost; and, most recently, a poetry chapbook, The Heart Broken Open. His most recent book is The Three-Petalled Rose: How the Synthesis of Judaism, Buddhism, and Stoicism Can Create a Healthy, Fulfilled and Flourishing Life (iUniverse: 2013).
“As to diseases, make a habit of two things—to help, or at least to do no harm.”
–Hippocrates, Epidemics, in Hippocrates, trans. W. H. S. Jones (1923), Vol. I, 165 [italics added]
“An agnostic is someone who doesn’t know, and di– is a Greek prefix meaning “two.” So “diagnostic” means someone who doesn’t know twice as much as an agnostic doesn’t know.”
–Walt Kelly, Pogo
A funny thing happened to me on the way to the New York Times “Sunday Dialogue” —I made myself unclear.¹ This is not supposed to happen to careful writers, or to those of us who flatter ourselves with that honorific. So what went wrong?
In brief, I greatly underestimated the public’s strong identification of psychiatric diagnosis with the categorical approach of the recent DSMs. But whereas my letter to the Times was indeed occasioned by DSM-5’s release in May, my argument in defense of psychiatric diagnosis was not a testimonial in favor of any one type of diagnostic scheme—categorical, dimensional, prototypical² or otherwise…
http://www.meactionuk.org.uk/The-Achilles-Heel.htm
Stephen Ralph | March 30, 2013
In recent years I have been considering the reliability of the whole “CFS/ME” diagnostic process.
From personal experience I have encountered numerous doctors who failed to possess the detailed specialist knowledge they needed to make a diagnosis of Behçet’s disease at both GP and specialist level.
From personal experience I have learned that standard blood tests or even CT/MRI scans or indeed other diagnostic tests such as endoscopy can and do fail to detect a complex clinical disease present in a patient.
I have no doubt that there is a diagnostic black hole between the insufficient knowledge of the doctor and pathologies that are not detectable by the basic tests they choose to request which produce negative results they then choose to rely on.
The diagnoses of “CFS/ME” and now Somatic Symptom Disorder have in my view been deployed by liaison psychiatry to exploit that black hole.
dx revision watch 