By John Gever, Deputy Managing Editor
MedPage Today
Published: May 17, 2013
A new edition of psychiatry's diagnostic guide "will probably lead to substantial false-positive rates and unnecessary treatment," charged the man who led development of the last version.
To be released this weekend at the American Psychiatric Association's annual meeting, the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM-5, "introduce[s] several high-prevalence diagnoses at the fuzzy boundary with normality," according to Allen Frances, MD, who chaired the task force responsible for DSM-IV issued in 1994.
Frances, now an emeritus professor at Duke University, wrote online in Annals of Internal Medicine that changes from DSM-IV will apply disease labels to individuals who may be unhappy or offensive but still normal. Such individuals would include those experiencing "the forgetfulness of old age" as well as children with severe, chronic temper tantrums and individuals with physical symptoms with no medical explanation.
He also worried about new marketing pushes from the pharmaceutical industry seeking to exploit what he believes are "loose" diagnostic criteria in the new edition. "Drug companies take marketing advantage of the loose DSM definitions by promoting the misleading idea that everyday life problems are actually undiagnosed psychiatric illness caused by a chemical imbalance and requiring a solution in pill form," he wrote.
The entire article is here.
