the New DSM5 is out,, oh my

there are a couple of major changes in the new DSM5, including an overall change in the language, which has not really been updated in 20 yrs, according to Yahoo News. here are a couple of links to get you started,,

Yahoo! Shine - Women's Lifestyle | Healthy Living and Fashion Blogs

DSM5 - new child Dx, explosive rage disorder

The fight over what grief means

DSM5 - excludes grief from depression for 2 weeks, instead of one year

oh joy, there are bound to be so many new and wonderful ways to crap-shoot for meds~!

I don't know if someone feels they are only experiencing grief why would they pursue treatment for it. I can see how some of the new wording and such could be problematic, but on the other hand I doubt they are going to force mandatory treatment on anyone who's sad or going through grief longer than two weeks.

I think people still have the option to seek treatment or not. But I can see how it could be misleading and potentially lead to more use of prescription meds even where its not exactly nessisary...so I sort of wonder if the pharmacutical companies pushed for some of the changes. I guess it would be easier to form an opinion if I could actually read the new DSM rather than relying on second hand information either for or against it.

well, I can see pharma ads

"my wife of 20 years died 15 days ago, and I am still sad..." followed my pill ad.

In other words, get over it, or get your prescription today :/

What really worries me is that 70% of those working on the DSM V had connections to big pharm and trend toward medication. We still do not understand how these meds are working or the long term effects on children. It seems to me they just added and changed diagnostics to justify more drugs. Since antidepressants will soon be mostly generic they need a way to start pushing the newest anti-psychotics that are still name brand and more expensive.

Scary! What happened to first do no harm?

this is scary! imagine you lost a person and then going to the pdoc office "i lost someone and im sad" (which is normal!) and you get pills to alleviate the sadness. i think if someone did that to me when i pass on i'll be sad because the person doesn't want to feel a tinge bit of sadness over the fact that his loved one is gone.

Nice work APA with grief and labels.
Another reason for me to hate them, awesome.

On a personal note, my pdoc and I have talked about the difference between depression and grief. I see him for my meds for depression. We both agree that my ongoing sadness over my mother's death has nothing to do with depression. While the feelings of grief overlap the feelings of depression they are not the same thing.

There are no people in the DSM.

If anyone has been following the updates being proposed and made to the DSM-V manual over the years, you'll already know that there has been a lot of controversy concerning how certain conditions are diagnosed and treated. The NIMH (National Institute of Mental Health) Organization itself has somewhat renounced their support for this new version. You can read about it here if you're interested: National Institute of Mental Health Will Not Support DSM-V.

Anyone notice that Doc John is cited in the article about NIMH?

NIMH is going to create it's own manual: National Institute Of Mental Health To Drop DSM Use

They're more pro-biological psychiatry versus "symptoms" like the DSM is/has been. I don't know that I want psychiatry to get even more drug-happy and blood/medical tests, etc. Not all of life can be reduced to medical/biological factors; Skinner taught us a lot but we're human, not reducible to just biology; we have frontal lobes and I know how to use mine, thank you very much

Think it's safe to assume that the NIMH is going to be quite disappointed if they feel like they will know why people have MI in ten years. Brain is far to complex to put a time table on. I dislike both approaches... They are flawed at best.

A little disappointed not to see any Psych Central links in this thread. NIMH has not renounced their support whatsoever for the DSM-5 -- that's media spin and not at all true:

Did the NIMH Withdraw Support for the DSM-5? No | World of Psychology

Here is a rundown of the "big changes:"

DSM-5 Released: The Big Changes | World of Psychology

Few of these changes will result in the sky-is-falling kind of proclamations some have made online about the DSM-5. It's a pretty mild update to a reference manual that hasn't been updated in 19 years... Even the number of disorders included remains largely the same.

All of our DSM-5 Coverage is here:

DSM-5 Resource Guide - Psych Central

DocJohn