The “Bible of Psychiatry” Faces Damning Criticism—From the Inside

[n2doc]

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, better known as the DSM, governs the tricky science of psychiatric diagnosis. But this gold standard of diagnosis is anything but infallible: as knowledge of mental disorders grows, successive editions have had to change their definitions. The fifth version, due to be published next year, is already drawing criticism—and the most recent attack comes from within the DSM-5’s ranks.
Roel Verheul and John Livesley, a psychologist and psychiatrist who were members of the DSM-5 work group for for personality disorders, found that the group ignored their warnings about its methods and recommendations. In protest, they resigned, explaining why in an email to Psychology Today. Their disapproval stems from two primary problems with the proposed classification system: its confusing complexity, and its refusal to incorporate scientific evidence.

The proposal displays a truly stunning disregard for evidence. Important aspects of the proposal lack any reasonable evidential support of reliability and validity. For example, there is little evidence to justify which disorders to retain and which to eliminate. Even more concerning is the fact that a major component of proposal is inconsistent with extensive evidence…This creates the untenable situation of the Work Group advancing a taxonomic model that it has acknowledged in a published article to be inconsistent with the evidence.

more

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2012/07/13/the-bible-of-psychiatry-faces-damning-criticism-from-the-inside/

[struggle4progress]

1. That may be. It also may be unavoidable. Medicine itself is part science and part art: the notion of

a "syndrome," as a cluster of symptoms, not all of which may be present in any particular case, seems to be useful for disease diagnosis, despite its sometime fuzziness

And the situation with mental "disorders" is naturally even trickier, not only because the diagnostician unavoidably brings, to the diagnostic task, a number of personal cultural presuppositions, but also because "understanding" the psychology of other people requires inferences about "facts" that are not directly observable but can only be inferred

[HuckleB]

2. At this point in the neuroscience knowledge base, such controversies are unavoidable and necessary.

Last edited Tue Jul 17, 2012, 06:51 PM - Edit history (1)

Still, why would they go public about this by sending an e-mail to the quackarama publication known as Psychology Today? That just seems to hurt their cause. Ugh.

[cbayer]

3. Here is a link to their letter and, even after reading it twice, I am having

difficulty discerning what their actual concerns are.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/dsm5-in-distress/201207/two-who-resigned-dsm-5-explain-why

Personality Disorders have been and will be the most difficult group to study and precisely define. While I have not seen the DSM-V section yet, there was certainly room for improvement.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

4. thanks for the OP and the link.interesting. bkmrkd.