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DSM-V: the New Way to Mental Health

This year, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) released a new book, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Illness, the 5^th Edition (DSM-V) to assist psychologists and psychiatrists all over the world in their complex process of diagnosing mental illnesses in their clients and patients. Perhaps it was harsh that before the manual had a chance, before it had been published even it received high criticism, even ridicule, from those involved in the Psychological world, and even some outside of it.

It was in May of this year that The Saturday Times allowed an article comparing the DSM V to another book on mental illness, saying that the DSM was an irrelevant factor that would simply not compare. The argument being that the DSM-IV-TR was sufficient for the job and what could a 5^th edition to this book do.
It then quite surprised me when the book was released that the reviews of the manual were indeed worse than the predictions before the book was published. Id like to remind my readers that the process for diagnosing any mental illness is complicated and measured rarely on physiological factors, signs and symptoms of mental illness can be completely ignored and so a diagnosis may not be made, or one may be made inaccurately. I do question how we can judge people on their differences in reactions when we measure their ‘health’ purely on the word of mouth and the opinions of a man or woman with a certificate or five.

Before the publishing of the DSM V I heard rumours that the manual would render everyone as having a mental illness, and that it would severely affect those who had previously been diagnosed. An article by Michael Berger drew my attention this week. He writes about the DSM. It seems I am not alone in my view of mental illness and the diagnostic process when he describes it as a process of “inherent problems with existing systems of psychiatric classifications” and believes that we are making diagnoses in the absence of “identifiable physiological abnormalities.”, and so it would seem I am far from alone in my views of psychiatric diagnoses.

However, Berger goes on to complain about the new groupings in the DSM V, including the grouping of Schizophrenia (an arguably biological problem) with things such as conduct disorder (an arguable excuse), yet it seems that Berger seems to be arguing for a more physiological approach to mental health assessment, claiming that we can listen to symptoms of people but where do we cross the line from normality? Should we just listen to the symptom’s people tell us we could beneficially limit it down to a singular mental illness as the boundaries between one another would be crossed in just moments. Thus Berger (and I) would argue for a more biological approach.

In an article by Boyle on the biological determination of schizophrenia, she failed to find proof of it only being life experience which causes such an illness. When it is mentioned that things such as childhood abuse have played huge parts in the diagnosis of personality and mood disorders, plus just about every other mental health problem, then where would the boundary for such life experiences be? And so perhaps Berger is right to argue for a more wholly identifiable way of approaching the diagnosis of mental illness and maybe we should put aside our guides for the symptoms of mental illness and consider more research into the use of more modern technology such as fMRI or CAT scanning to see if we can find at least a correlation between mental illness and the physiological effects it may have.