There’s a thread here that deserves to be tied together. The topic is the Bereavement Exclusion that the DSM-5 Task Force removed from the diagnosis of Major Depressive Disorder [DSM-IV]: E. The symptoms are not better accounted for by Bereavement, i.e., after the loss of a loved one, the symptoms persist for longer than 2 […]
Somatic Symptom Disorder is running a close second to the DSM-5 removal of the Bereavement Exclusion [in the range of a mandate…] as a revision that’s a nidus for divisiveness and controversy: The new somatic symptom disorder in DSM-5 risks mislabeling many people as mentally ill by Allen Frances British Medical Journal 2013. 346:f1580 The […]
Sunday Dialogue: Defining Mental Illness New York Times March 23, 2013 To the Editor: 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” […]
Opening Pandora’s box: how DSM-5 is coming to grief by Gordon Parker Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica 2013: 1–4. DOI: 10.1111/acps.12110 In mourning, it is the world which has become poor and empty; in depression it is the ego itself. Freud Until recently, DSM-5 architects had sought to reposition grief within the depressive disorders: a proposal generating […]
hat tip to assertTrue() I spent the last couple of days in Atlanta seeing old friends, going to some events. After driving back in the rain, I was tired and had an evening watching British videos [Tolkein’s Hobbit and two Ben Goldacres – equally entertaining]. While there, I spent some time with some old psychiatrist […]
and again…
After reading that study on the placebo effect [not the case…], I recalled a post on Pharmalot earlier in the year that discussed a report on the results of recruitment in Clinical Trials: What Patients? The Trouble With Trial Enrollment Pharmalot By Ed Silverman January 15th, 2013 There is good news and bad news about […]
I put this one aside for a while because I was at something of a loss about what to say. A few years back when I first started looking at Clinical Trials in any kind of systematic way, I was awed with the monotony of the graphs in the articles. I made up a graph […]
Self diagnosis is a dangerous thing, but I think I’m an Optimist. Diagnoses like Optimism and Pessimism are hard for the afflicted to accept, because the diagnosis implies that one’s vision isn’t necessarily correct, but rather distorted by a mental attitude. There have only been two issues [before this one] that have grabbed my attention […]
I appreciate the comments to the last post. I learned a few things – like the classical twin studies as the hallmark of genetic influence being called into question. I’m not an up-on-genetics person, but it’s infinitely apparent that the Mendel/Watson&Crick genetics I learned has been turned upside-down in these post Human Genome Project days […]