Quotes About DSM

Oddly enough, there's no name in the DSM for the compulsion to diagnose people.

It is good to know and use the DSM definitions, but not to reify or worship them.31,32

DSM definitions do not include personal and contextual factors such as whether the depressive symptoms are an understandable response to loss, a terrible life situation, psychological conflict or personality factors.

T]he DSM alone does not establish standards. Physicians, other mental health workers, drug companies, advocacy groups, school systems, the courts, the Internet, and cable TV all get to vote on how the written word will actually be used and misused.

Our classification of mental disorders is no more than a collection of fallible and limited constructs that seeks but never finds the truth - but this remains our best current way of communicating about, treating, and researching mental disorders. [...] It is good to know and use the DSM definitions, but not to reify or worship them.

Simply put, the DSM is a highly constructed projection placed on top of particular body-mind experiences in order to label, organize, and make meanings of them from within a specific worldview.

Studies of the DSM-II found that when two psychiatrists consulted the same patient, they gave the same DSM diagnosis only between 32 and 42 percent of the time. Rates of consistency have improved since then, but the diagnosis of many mental disorders remains, despite pretensions to the contrary, more art than science.b

Our prejudices lead us to tear nature where we want it to break. Gary Greenberg, The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry

DSM rules specify that disorders cannot be added or dropped without conclusive empirical evidence. This is why lobbying to drop DID from DSM-5 was unsuccessful: there was no empirical foundation for such a change.

John Briere, quip that if Cptsd were ever given its due, the DSM [The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] used by all mental health professionals would shrink from its dictionary like size to the size of a thin pamphlet.

I once heard renowned traumatologist, John Briere, quip that if Cptsd were ever given its due, the DSM [The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] used by all mental health professionals would shrink from its dictionary like size to the size of a thin pamphlet. In other words, the role of traumatized childhoods in most adult psychological disorders is enormous.

I once heard renowned traumatologist, John Briere, quip that if Cptsd were ever given its due, the DSM [The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] used by all mental health professionals would shrink from its dictionary like size to the size of a thin pamphlet.