By Pat Kelly.
Thousands of people have signed an open letter expressing concern that updates to the DSM-V may lead to a rash of misdiagnoses and over-diagnoses.
Due to be published in 2013, the revisions to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) contains some new psychiatric disorders and alterations to the classical definitions of some existing disorders that may cast the net too wide in terms of diagnoses.
In the letter, which can be accessed via http://bit.ly/sy8R77, was authored by Dr David Elkins, Psychologist at the Pepperdine University in California.
However the British Psychological Society (BPS) — representing nearly 50,000 members — had also previously expressed its concerns to the American Psychiatric Association (APA), authors of the DSM series, now in its 5th edition. The BPS drafted a detailed, 26-page letter to the APA (available at http://bit.ly/iHe96s) in which it explained its misgivings about the alterations, including the creation of “attenuated psychosis syndrome”, which the BPS says could simply be used by some to “stigmatise eccentric people”.
“We are concerned that clients and the general public are negatively affected by the continued and continuous medicalisation of their natural and normal responses to their experiences; responses which undoubtedly have distressing consequences which demand helping responses, but which do not reflect illnesses so much as normal individual variation,” the BPS stressed to the APA.
For his own part, Dr Elkins’s open letter states: “The Conditions Proposed by Outside Sources that are under consideration for DSM-5 contain several unsubstantiated and questionable disorder categories. For example, ‘Apathy Syndrome,’ ‘Internet Addiction Disorder’ and ‘Parental Alienation Syndrome’ have virtually no basis in the empirical literature,” he says.
The campaign of opposition is snowballing and at time of writing, almost 3,000 people have signed Dr Elkins’s petition. Among the other new or altered disorder classifications proposed for the DSM-V are ‘Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder’, ‘Attenuated Psychosis Syndrome’, and a reduction in the number of criteria necessary for a diagnosis of Attention Deficit Disorder.
The proposed changes can be viewed at www.dsm5.org.
pat.kelly@imt.ie
About Pat Kelly
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