The media campaign on the DSM-5: Recurring comments and lessons for the future of diagnosis in psychiatric practice

Abstract

Recurring arguments in the media campaign preceding and following the publication of the DSM-5 have been that the manual, referred to as 'the bible of psychiatry', mislabels many people who are basically normal, and that the diagnostic categories it contains are invalid, not being based on laboratory tests. We present data on the use of the DSM worldwide, and discuss the need to assess systematically the pros and cons of operational and prototype approaches to psychiatric diagnosis. We consider different views about what qualifies as mental disorder and how the boundary between pathology and normality should be fixed. We review the role of laboratory tests as applied in medicine, emphasising that most of them are probabilistic, not pathognomonic, markers of disease. We finally summarise the promise and limitations of the Research Domain Criteria project, aiming to 'transform psychiatric diagnosis' by replacing descriptive psychopathology with behavioural and neurobiological measures.