The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is the comprehensive guide to diagnosing psychological disorders. This manual is published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and is currently in its fifth revision. Moreover, the manual is utilized by a multitude of mental health care professionals around the world in the process of identifying individuals with disorders and provides a comprehensive list of the various disorders that have been identified. The DSM serves as the essential resource for diagnosis of mental disorders based off of the various signs and symptoms displayed by individuals while also providing a basic reference point for the treatment of the different disorders. The manual attempts to remain scientific in its approach to identifying the underlying symptoms of each disorder while meeting the needs of the different psychological perspectives and the various mental health fields. The DSM has recently gone through a major revision from the DSM-IV-TR to the DSM-5 and contains many significant changes in both the diagnosis of mental disorders and their classifications.
History of change
Originally published in 1952, the DSM has been through a number of revisions in its history. The original manual was the culmination of an extended journey of its own. According to Tartokovsky (2011), the DSM was born out of the need to minimize the confusion that had developed in the world of mental health care with regard to classifying disorders. Prior to this, there had been an initial attempt to create a system of classification that had emerged in 1917 known as the Statistical Manual for the Use of Institutions for the Insane. The manual was written by the early predecessor to the APA and wa...
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American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition. Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Publishing.
(312) When answering the question we first need to understand what reliability and validity means and why it is important to include them in the criteria to judge DSM-5. Reliability is the consistency of the assessment measurements throughout the test. Whereas validity is when the test actually measures what it is suppose to measure (Comer, 2013, pp.84). Now that we know what reliability and validity are we can now apply it to DSM-5, but what is DSM-5? DSM-5 is shortened from Diagnostic and Statistical Manual Of mental Disorders and the five shows how much it has changed over the years. This classification wouldn’t be possible without Emil Krapelin who developed the first modern classification system for abnormal behavior which helped form the first DSM. The DSM-5 list approximately 400 mental disorders each one explains the criteria for diagnosing the disorder and key clinical features and sometimes describes features that are often times not related to the disorder. The classification is further explained by the back ground information such as: research finds, age, culture, gender trends, and each disorder’s prevalence, risk, course, complications predisposing factors, and family patterns (Comer, 2013, pp.100).
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Psychologists Hunt and McHale (2010, p.20) state that according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM):
Identification of any psychosocial or contextual factors to be considered, as outlined in the DSM-5
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The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) has been used for decades as a guidebook for the diagnosis of mental disorders in clinical settings. As disorders and diagnoses evolve, new versions of the manual are published. This tends to happen every 10 years or so with the first manual (DSM-I) having been published in 1952. For the purpose of this discussion, we will look at the DSM-IV, which was published originally in 1994, and the latest version, DSM-5, that was published in May of 2013. Each version of the DSM contains “three major components: the diagnostic classification, the diagnostic criteria sets, and the descriptive text” (American Psychiatric Association, 2012). Within the diagnostic classification you will find a list of disorders and codes which professionals in the health care field use when a diagnosis is made. The diagnostic criteria will list symptoms of disorders and inform practitioners how long a patient should display those symptoms in order to meet the criteria for diagnosis of a disorder. Lastly, the descriptive text will describe disorders in detail, including topics such as “Prevalence” and “Differential Diagnosis” (APA, 2012). The recent update of the DSM from version IV-TR to 5 has been controversial for many reasons. Some of these reasons include the overall structure of the DSM to the removal of certain disorders from the manual.
At CAFS, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-IV (DSM-IV) has been used for the diagnosis of mental disorders. Although I completed my Bachelor of Arts with a major in Psychology, I had experienced difficulty in following discussions between clinicians during MDT due to a lack of knowledge about mental disorders, and I was required to refresh my memories and to improve my knowledge about common mental disorders in children and adolescents. Towards the end of my placement I had become more comfortable with myself following discussions at MDT with assistance and guidance from CAFS