New Scientist Calls For End Of The DSM

[Butterfly]

New Scientist Calls For End Of The DSM
16 December, 2009


http://www.furiousseasons.com/archives/2009/12/new_scientist_calls_for_end_of_the_dsm.html


I'm sure most of you are aware of what a profound mess the DSM-5 process has become, such a mess that last week the American Psychiatric Association postponed the planned release of DSM-5 by one year to 2013. Now the influential, UK-based New Scientist magazine has editorialized that the DSM has "outlived its usefulness" and in an accompanying article details the so-called civil war supposedly erupting within psychiatry over the DSM-5 process. The article doesn't add much to what readers of this site already know--the secrecy, the pharma conflicts, the opposition of editors of DSM-3 and DSM-4--but the editorial is the first formal call I've seen in the science press for the DSM to be scrapped or its process to be substantially altered.

[Allamakee]

Here is the link for the New Scientist editorial:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427382.400-times-up-for-psychiatrys-bible.html

It doesn't reject the idea of the psychiatric standards in DSM so much as call for a different way of updating those standards.  As a community, we would still be fighting the same battles, just in a different way.

With the advent of the internet, there is no longer any compelling need to rewrite the diagnostic criteria for the whole of psychiatry in one go. Yes, diagnoses should be revised as new scientific findings come in. But for this, specialists can be assembled when necessary to address specific areas that have become outmoded. Their suggestions can be posted on the web for comment. More research can be commissioned, if necessary. And when consensus is reached, new diagnostic criteria can be posted online.