NIMH Drops DSM

NIMH Will Drop Widely Used Psychiatry Manual NIMH director says the DSM lacks biological validity in its diagnoses: “Patients with mental disorders deserve better.” Just weeks before the American Psychiatric Association is expected to publish its new addition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, the director of National Institute of Mental Health’s director announced via blog post that his institution will be “re-orienting its research away from DSM categories.” The DSM is a manual for diagnosing and classifying mental disorders and is widely used by doctors and researchers. As Thomas Insel writes in his post, the goal of the manual is to “provide a common language for describing psychopathology.” The problem, however, is a “lack of validity.”  technologyreview.com/