Recent quotes:

National Institute Of Mental Health Forsakes the DSM, the Bible Of Psychiatry

NIMH's move away from the DSM is a necessary paradigm shift that will, in the long run, enable researchers to find new ways to improve psychiatric diagnosis, and heal a society which is simultaneously under-treated for mental illness and over-medicated in all of the wrong ways. Dr. Thomas Insel, the director of the NIMH, explained that while the DSM manual has improved reliability and helped to standardize mental health treatment across different health care providers, the diagnostic categories still lack underlying scientific validity. He wrote: "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."