Analysis of Improvements from DSM IV to DSM 5

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM) provides standard criteria for diagnosing mental disorders. It serves numerous purposes and delineates a common language for researchers, clinicians, educators and students. The APA released the fifth edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical manual of mental disorders in May 2013 after 12 years of research involving a diverse range of 400 experts from 12 countries worldwide (Kuhl, Kupfer, & Reiner, 2013). While the release of the new DSM 5 has caused much controversy in the field of psychiatry, specifically for its changes in specific diagnosis and new disorders, the structural changes that have been made seem to be an improvement from the previous DSM IV and will help clinicians diagnose and treat patients in a more straightforward and precise way.

One of the most debated proposals for the DSM 5 was a proposal to re-structure the DSM into five clusters of mental disorders that shared certain external validating factors. While this proposal was not entirely adopted in the actual DSM 5, many concepts and ideas from this proposed idea were used. The idea behind this metastructure originated from advances in the field of psychiatry since the DSM IV that demonstrated that many disorders share external validating factors such as genetic risk factors, rates of co-morbidity, and likely course (Andrews, Goldberg, Krueger, Carpenter, Hyman, Sachdev, & Pine, 2009). These ideas were backed up by twin studies that showed how important genetic and environmental risk factors are and raised concerns about the current structure of the DSM IV, because it focused more on excluding false-positive results in diagnosis. Consequently, categorical groups were too limited and this resu...

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