Sign the Petition! Statement of Concern About the Reliability, Validity and Safety of DSM-5

… These concerns should be resolved through concerted, interprofessional, international dialogue and scientific research. Until then, because there are safe and legal alternatives, clinicians, researchers, journal editors, healthcare planners, managers & commissioners, the pharmaceutical industry, and the media should avoid use of DSM-5 wherever possible.

Stop the Insanity: Now is the time for mental health professionals and consumers to respond to the problems of the DSM-5. Statement of Concern – Complete Version (http://dsm5response.com/statement-of-concern)

Note: DSM-5 refers to the American Psychiatric Association’s fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; a handbook for psychiatric diagnosis and classification, scheduled for publication for 20th May, 2013. …

Statement of Concern about the Reliability, Validity, and Safety of DSM-5

We, the undersigned, are concerned that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition (DSM-5):

Includes many diagnostic categories with questionable reliability, which may lead to misleading assumptions about their scientific validity; …

Did not receive a much-needed and widely requested external scientific review; …

May compromise patient safety through the implementation of lowered diagnostic thresholds and the introduction of new diagnostic categories that do not have sufficient empirical backing; …

Is the result of a process that gives the impression of putting institutional needs ahead of public welfare. …

Because of the above, we fear that DSM-5:

May result in the mislabeling of mental illness in people who would fare better without a psychiatric diagnosis; …

May result in unnecessary and potentially harmful treatment, particularly with psychiatric medication; …

May divert precious mental health resources away from those who most need them. …

I selected some quotes from the complete version:

… The anticipated result is broad increase in the number of persons who qualify for a diagnosis of mental disorder, especially among individuals whose symptoms would have been considered subclinical in DSMs III and IV …

Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder may be diagnosed in children and adolescents displaying significant mood swings (temper tantrums), which may be developmentally normal and resolve without treatment. Although the new category was invented with the aim of precluding the controversial practice of diagnosing Pediatric Bipolar Disorder, the latter diagnosis never existed in previous editions of the manual due to its questionable validity.

Mild Neurocognitive Disorder appears to describe normal cognitive decline that may be expected in elderly populations. Over-diagnosis of mental disorder and psychiatric treatment in the elderly –especially elderly populations in nursing homes– is already a nationwide problem in the US and other countries. …

Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder transforms severe PMS into a psychiatric disorder. In the past, similar proposals have been excluded from previous editions of the DSM due to substantial controversy and attention from women’s rights groups because of the risk of pathologizing women’s experience. …

Our duty in the medical and helping professions is, first and foremost, to do no harm. Thus, as mental health practitioners and researchers, we are greatly concerned about the introduction of empirically questionable diagnostic concepts into psychiatric and general medical practice. …

Additional concerns about the DSM-5 development process include hiring of a pubic relations firm (GYMR) to influence public opinion about the manual through a PR website (http://dsmfacts.org/), the lack of external scientific evaluation of the proposals, and the lack of a formal forensic review. …

[economic crises are mentioned for example] … It is a marker of humanitarian progress that we attempt to help people in distress. But, to take one example of many, it is unhelpful to suggest that a child throwing temper tantrums or a woman experiencing ‘period pains’ is mentally ill. It is unhelpful to suggest that a consumer seeking help from medical doctors is, by virtue of multiple complaints or visiting multiple doctors, mentally ill. Clients and the general public are negatively affected by the continued and continuous medicalization of their natural and normal responses to their experiences; responses which undoubtedly have distressing consequences that demand helping responses, but which do not reflect illnesses so much as normal individual variation. …

Recently, mounting empirical evidence has suggested that psychiatric medication, though helpful when used properly, may lead to iatrogenic consequences when used inappropriately. For example, antipsychotic medications, which are increasingly used to treat non-psychotic symptoms such as depression and anxiety, may lead to metabolic syndrome, obesity, diabetes, Parkinson’s-like movement disorders, neurocognitive decline, psychotic symptoms, reduced brain volume, and significantly shortened lifespan ….

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