Time to revamp psychiatry and mental health in light of modern neuroscience?

Transforming Diagnosis (article by Thomas Insel, Director of the NIMH): “In a few weeks, the American Psychiatric Association will release its new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)…While DSM has been described as a “Bible” for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each. The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been “reliability” – each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity. Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure. In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain or the quality of fever. Indeed, symptom-based diagnosis, once common in other areas of medicine, has been largely replaced in the past half century as we have understood that symptoms alone rarely indicate the best choice of treatment. Patients with mental disorders deserve better. NIMH has launched the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) project to transform diagnosis by incorporating genetics, imaging, cognitive science, and other levels of information to lay the foundation for a new classification system…” No One Is Abandoning the DSM, but It Is Almost Time to Transform It (SciAm blog post): “Let me be clear: mental illness is re...
Source: SharpBrains - Category: Neurologists Authors: Tags: Cognitive Neuroscience Health & Wellness dementia DSM-5 mental-disorders Mental-Health NIMH psychiatry RDoC schizophrenia Thomas Insel Source Type: blogs