Dsm IV Progress

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is published by the American Psychiatric Association and provides a common language and standard criteria for the classification of mental disorders. It is used in the United States and in varying degrees around the world, by clinicians, researchers, psychiatric drug regulation agencies, health insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies and policy makers. The DSM was first published in 1952 and has had five revisions. Prior to the 1950s the state of psychiatric classification in the United States was largely disorganized, as no standard system was in place for operationalizing specific mental disorders.

In analyzing the weaknesses of the DSM I and II the manuals had vague descriptions of mental illnesses, were problematic and not user friendly. In 1980 DSM III had a dramatic change in thinking and in the approach to help alleviate this problem by providing diagnosticians with explicit diagnostic criteria. The current classification system, DSM-IV is a clear advance over DSM-I and DSM-II. The DSM has attracted controversy and criticism as well as praise.

The manual evolved from systems for collecting census and psychiatric hospital statistics, and from a manual developed by the US Army, and was dramatically revised in 1980. The last major revision was the fourth edition ("DSM-IV"), published in 1994, although a "text revision" was produced in 2000. The fifth edition ("DSM-5") is currently in consultation, planning and preparation, due for publication in May 2013. ICD-10 Chapter V: Mental and behavioral disorders, part of the International Classification of Diseases produced by the World Health Organization (WHO), is another commonly-used guide, more so in Europe and other parts of the world. The coding system used in the DSM-IV is designed to correspond with the codes used in the ICD, although not all codes may match at all times because the two publications are not revised synchronously.

The DSM-IV-TR states, because it is produced for the completion of federal legislative mandates, its use by people without clinical training can lead to inappropriate application of its contents. Appropriate use of the diagnostic criteria is said to require extensive clinical training, and its contents "cannot simply be applied in a cookbook