The symptom checklist - “So why change it? This was the approach adopted by the workgroup.” Grade: F-minus.
Mixed anxiety depression - “The recognition of anxious-depression is long-overdue.” Grade: C.
Mixed depression-mania episodes - “On this very important issue, the DSM-5 workgroup has not handed in its homework.” Grade: Incomplete.
Moving on ...
Chronic and Recurrent Depression
These are two entirely different animals. For the first time, the DSM would fully acknowledge the chronic variety (“chronic depressive disorder” with an episode lasting at least two years). The new diagnosis would subsume dysthymia and change its threshold to include major depression as well as low grade depression.
Gone is the “chronic” specifier to a major depressive episode.
The DSM-IV criteria for recurrent depression would stand, namely two or more major depressive episodes (lasting at least two weeks) at least two months apart. No provision is made, however, for the reality of highly-recurrent depressions that come and go at a faster rate.
Recurrent depression - and the highly-recurrent variety in particular - may have more in common with bipolar depression than unipolar depression, or at least may occupy common ground in dire need of mapping. Somewhere, somehow, on some level, the rather obvious overlap between unipolar and bipolar needs to be recognized and dealt with. On this vital issue, the workgroup looked the other way.
Grade: F.
Severity
The DSM-5 Task Force mandated its various workgroups to come up with sophisticated severity measures analogous to assessing hypertension. This would obviate the rather arbitrary and clumsy distinction the current DSM makes between major depression and dysthymia (which the workgroup proposes eliminating).
It also places less emphasis on the symptom checklist. Thus, someone with all nine depression symptoms who is nevertheless able to hold down a job and keep his or her marriage going is in much better shape than someone with only four symptoms who technically does not meet the threshold for major depression but hasn’t been able to get out of bed in six months.
The Mood Disorders workgroup is currently investigating a variety of measures.
Grade: Incomplete.
The Specifiers
The current DSM uses these to parse out different types of major depression, thus major depression with: psychotic features, catatonic features, melancholic features, atypical features, postpartum onset.
The DSM-5 would leave this list intact with two exceptions. “Chronic” is removed as a specifier and upgraded to a diagnosis, and “mixed features” is added with no explanation. In addition some changes are added to the psychotic features specifier to account for severity as well as type (“congruent” or “incongruent”).
The problem with specifiers in this context is they are only as good as the symptom checklist they are supposed to be specifying. There must be a better way, for instance, of distinguishing an agitated depression from a vegetative one or a mainly sad state of mind from one characterized by the lack of ability to care.
Think of depression as too much emotion on one hand and not enough on the other. Factor in too much or not enough thinking, and you can see that the experts charged with this brief had their work cut out them. They didn’t put in the work.
Grade: F.
Reactive Depression
The DSM-II of 1968 distinguished between what it saw as biologically-based depression (endogenous) and depression seen as a reaction to stressful events (exogenous). The DSM-III and its successors wisely ditched speculating about cause and effect and stuck to categorizing observable symptoms.
Thirty years later, however, advances in brain science suggest some merit in going back to the future, but with this ironic twist: Although current brain science does not yet support diagnostic descriptions based on underlying biology, one can make a good biological case for supposedly non-biological reactive depression.
Not only that, we already know that managing stress is a key to managing one’s depression. Stress Junction is where Freud, brain science, and common sense meet. The DSM-5 workgroup missed the bus.
Grade: F-minus.
Personality
Can persistent and treatment-resistant depression be looked upon as a personality disorder? Consider this assignment extra credit. Neither the Mood Disorders nor the Personalities Disorders workgroups took up the challenge.
No grade.
We’re not finished. Stay tuned for Part III ...
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3 comments:
Thank you for your posts on the DSM revision, as little hope as they hold. Looks like we're looking at business as usual for the forseeable future: a document that panders to the drug companies. What else could we possibly have expected?
Thanks, Elizabeth. Past ties to the drug companies are certainly part of it in the sense that no one except patients have an interest in upsetting the status quo. Way too many parties are invested in the way things are for change to happen, so the draft DSM was no surprise to me.
But the real problem is the people working on the DSM are wedded to their own beliefs and practices. Most of them have worked in a 1980 DSM-III universe their entire lives and lack the mindset to imagine a different one.
This is classic Thomas Kuhn, who noted that paradigm shifts are brought on by young practitioners and those outside the profession. The paradigm shift will occur, but it will be led by people specialized in researching the brain and those who are interested in why we act the way we do, as well as open-minded young psychiatrists not invested in the status-quo.
The DSM-5 may be the last of the DSM as we know it.
That was enjoyable to read, thanks for posting it.
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