Psychiatry's "Bible" Gets an Overhaul

By Ferris Jabr | May 7, 2012 | 10

The fifth version of psychiatry’s bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, slated for publication in May 2013, represents the first substantial change to psychiatric diagnosis in more than 30 years.
In 2010 the American Psychiatric Association debuted a draft of the new manual on their Web site that has so far received 50 million hits from about 500,000 individuals, many of them critics.

The revised manual will very likely scrap psychiatry staples such as Asperger’s syndrome and paranoid personality disorder.

Additions to the diagnostic menu are likely to include an ailment for children marked by severe temper tantrums and for adults a type of sex addiction.
Editor's Note: Read our blog series on psychiatry's new rulebook, the DSM-5.

In February 1969 David L. Rosenhan showed up in the admissions office of a psychiatric hospital in Pennsylvania. He complained of unfamiliar voices inside his head that repeated the words “empty,” “thud” and “hollow.” Otherwise, Rosenhan had nothing unusual to report. He was immediately admitted to the hospital with a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

Between 1969 and 1972 seven friends and students of Rosenhan, a psychology professor then at Swarthmore College, ended up in 11 other U.S. hospitals after claiming that they, too, heard voices—their sole complaint. Psychiatrists slapped them all with a diagnosis of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder and stuck them in psychiatric wards for between eight and 52 days. Doctors forced them to accept antipsychotic medication—2,100 pills in all, the vast majority of which they pocketed or tucked into their cheeks. Although the voices vanished once Rosenhan and the others entered the hospitals, no one realized that these individuals were healthy—and had been from the start. The voices had been a ruse.

The eight pseudopatients became the subject of a landmark 1973 paper in Science, “On Being Sane in Insane Places.” The conclusion: psychiatrists did not have a valid way to diagnose mental illness.

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http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=redefining-mental-illness