Posted on February 22, 2010 - by David

More on the DSM-V Changes

I regret how spotty my posts have been lately, but if I’m not writing something new every day the best thing I can do is point you to someone else’s work. With the proposed changes for the DSM-V being made public last week, there are plenty of opinions floating around on the internet. I found this op-ed piece from the Wall Street Journal by Yale psychiatrist Dr. Sally Satel interesting.

She points out that many of the proposed changes, (as well as the opposition to those changes), have more to do with stigma, labels, and identity issues than actual advances in the understanding of mental illness. Satel also mentions the common overlap in symptoms and diagnoses within individual patients, and underlines our relative ignorance as to how genes are actually related to mental illness:

The other problem that confounds psychiatry is how to draw boundaries around diagnostic categories, given that we rarely know the cause of mental illness at the neural level. Mental illnesses are the product of numerous genes that interact with one another, with the environment and also with experience. (A recent study by the National Institute of Mental Health found that 80 genes could be associated with bipolar disorder.) Add to this the miasma of social and personal encounters that impinge upon the genetically vulnerable individual—stress, poverty, family instability, drug or alcohol use, and so forth—and the causal mechanisms of any mental illness become staggeringly complex and elusive. Moreover, the “psychopathological pie,” as a colleague calls it, is rarely divided up as tidily as the manual implies. Patients often have symptoms that sprawl across several diagnostic categories. For example, half of kids who receive the diagnosis of bipolar disorder also have ADHD.

Of course, if you’ve been a regular reader of this blog you won’t be surprised that I take slight issue with her explanation of mental illness, (even though it might not be totally fair to judge her based on one sentence in a WSJ op-ed piece). The inadequacy of her own definition is made clear when she mentions that “80 genes could be associated with bipolar disorder,” but says nothing about how these genes “interact with each other.” Also, what is meant by “environment” and “experience” is unclear and could be taken in a variety of ways. She seems to offer a broad explanation for mental illness and demonstrates well that there major issues with the way we classify symptoms as disorders which often overlap, but like a good psychiatrists she still locates cause with genetics or “at the neural level.”

MindHacks has an extensive summary of the DSM-V changes with links to other major media coverage. I found his comments on the restructuring of the schizophrenia diagnosis and the addition of ‘psychosis risk syndrome’ particularly interesting. His article suggests that a lot of the more subtle changes are aimed at “de-freuding” the DSM. Definitely worth your time to check this out.