No retrospective of the DSM-5 process would be complete without a commentary from the summer of 2009, when things moved into the public arena. And there’s no better ringside commentator than Danny Carlat who was blogging the whole thing blow by blow. Senator Grassley’s Investigation was still in the news, and a few weeks before, […]
In DSM-5 retrospective I… I reviewed some of the story of the DSM-5 beginning with Kupfer et al’s 2002 book, A Research Agenda for the DSM-V [I continue to think that one can’t understand the DSM-5 without reading, or at least scanning that book – it’s a free pdf]. I thought it was a trick […]
Something very unusual happened in the process of the revision of the psychiatric diagnostic manual – the DSM-5 revision published last May. The leaders of the previous revisions, Robert Spitzer [DSM-III, DSM-IIIR] and Allen Frances [DSM-IV], both became outspoken critics of the enterprise and went public with their dissatisfaction. Dr. Spitzer was refused access the […]
About now, it would seem that the position of the DSM-5 Gurus is entrenched. Drs. Kupfer, Regier, and Scully have been mostly quiet except for Dr. Scully’s piece in the Huffington Post mentioned previously, ending with "…when it is published, on time, in 2013." And reading back over their responses, there’s little to suggest that […]
I’ve only included the response of Cosgrove and Krimsky from the Medscape article. The documentation for other parts of it are located below: The Cosgrove and Krimsky article [A Comparison of DSM-IV and DSM-5 Panel Members’ Financial Associations with Industry: A Pernicious Problem Persists] My comments on the article [must be crazy…] My comments on […]
Is DSM 5 A Public Trust Or An APA Cash Cow? Commercialism And Censorship Trump Concern For Quality Psychology Today: DSM-5 in Distress by Allen J. Frances, M.D. January 3, 2012 DSM 5 will have a big impact on how millions of lives are led and how scarce mental health resources are spent. Getting the […]
Why is DSM being revised? DSM has been periodically reviewed and significantly revised since the publication of DSM-I in 1952. Particularly over the past two decades, there has been a wealth of new information in neurology, genetics and the behavioral sciences that dramatically expands our understanding of mental illness. Researchers have generated a wealth of […]
Major Depressive Disorder [MDD] is a term that originated in the DSM-III in 1980 as a descriptive diagnosis, a fix for perceived difficulties with the previous diagnostic system. It replaced a number of previous diagnoses that its author, Robert Spitzer, thought could not be clearly discriminated – things like depressive neurosis, the melancholic depressions, involutional […]
We live in an age of Meta-Analyses and Systematic Reviews [studies of studies]. Some, like watchdog John Ioannidis, lament their frequency as redundant and/or unnecessary [The Mass Production of Redundant, Misleading, and Conflicted Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses]. But at least in the domain of neuroscience, I see these meta-analyses as an attempt at oversight in […]