[beloiseau]

What manual or set of guidelines is used to diagnose mental illness where you live? I live in the US and they mainly go by the DSM. I'm just curious to see differences by country, I think I've read there are slight differences in criteria.

PS, this is an interesting grid that compares the DSV-IV and the DSM-V criteria for personality disorders...not sure if it's proposed or actually in use.
http://www.psi.uba.ar/academica/carr...terial/dsm.pdf

[technigal]

In Canada they use the DSM

[Fuzzybear]

The DSM in the UK I believe

[greentires4me]

I believe DSM is a universal language that Pdocs and therapists use to diagnosis

Yeah I thought that too xx

[beloiseau]

I thought that some went by the ICD, I know that's used for coding but I thought it had diagnostic purposes too. Maybe I am mistaken!

[ginaaa22]

I actually work in the field of medical records and coding! For diagnosis coding we use (in the us) ICD-9-CM. the cm is for the united states. Other countries are using ICD-10. The DSM is also used for mental illness.

Many mental health professionals use the manual to determine and help communicate a patient's diagnosis after an evaluation; hospitals, clinics, and insurance companies in the US also generally require a DSM diagnosis for all patients treated. The DSM can be used clinically in this way, and also to categorize patients using diagnostic criteria for research purposes.

[Starling.]

ICD-10 in the UK, though I think the DSM may be used as well. I am technically diagnosed with emotionally unstable personality disorder / EUPD rather than BPD.

[Espresso]

DSM. The pdoc actually whipped it out when I questioned the BPD diagnosis (although I was more questioning why no one ever told me the diagnosis, but he went through each criterion with me anyway).

[bpdtransformation]

The DSM here in Eastern US. It was interesting to see with the release of the newest DSM V, how many hundreds of therapists and patients criticized it as being unscientific and mainly a way for psychiatrists and insurance companies to pathologize more people and profit from prescribing more pills. The former president of the DSM, Allen Frances, even wrote an open letter attacking the new book.

As an aside - and sorry for the off-topic comment, but it is tangentially related in that the increasing number of DSM diagnoses are tending to encourage more and more use of psychiatric drugs - I hope that more people will see that pills only control symptoms short-term, but they cannot cure Borderline Personality Disorder. Only working on one's problems alone and with other people (often in psychotherapy) can allow a person to recover to the point where they no longer have BPD at all.