Thursday, May 17, 2012

Mental Illness-Comprehensive Evaluation or Checklist?

5/17/12. In the New England Journal of Medicine (May 17, 2012), psychiatrists Paul McHugh and Phillip Slavney trace the history of the DSM --- a revolution in psychiatric understanding gone wrong. We have a psychiatric classification system that consists of lists of symptoms for each of the many maladies of the mind --- a list of symptoms akin to a cookbook of ingredients with no recipes.

McHugh and Slavney describe causal families or perspectives of DSM diagnoses ---- diseases, personality dimensions, motivated behaviors, and life encounters ---  "distinctive ways of affecting mental life, to name them 'perspectives' and by that metaphor to emphasize how understanding a case from one causal viewpoint might blind the diagnostician to contributions from others."

In his new book "Psychology's Ghosts," distinguised Harvard child psychologist Jerome Kagan develops McHugh's and Slavney's "Perspectives" in his critique of the DSM-5 and suggestions for improving our treatment of the mentally ill.

http://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMp1202555

For more background on "Perspectives," I recommend the following article by Paul McHugh:

http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/press/2001/august/McHugh.htm

1 comment:

Psychologist Jacksonville Florida said...

I like your article, I like your writing style. you need to update your blog.