Dsm-5 Changes In Communication

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders, or DSM, is overseen by the American Psychiatric Association, or APA. There are two changes in the DSM-5 and the first change is largely semantic by which there is a collapse of the three diagnoses (e.g. autism, Asperger’s disorder, pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified) into a single category called autism spectrum disorder. So, the single diagnosis replaces the subdivisions of autistic disorder, Asperger’s disorder, and PDD-NOS. In addition, another change is the number of domains as the social and communication were originally separate domains, but the APA committee decided to collapse the three clinical domains (e.g. social interaction, communication, restrictive

The first criteria deals with the social reciprocity and this ranges from a total lack of initiation of social interaction, which an individual might show classic signs of autism where they refuse to acknowledge or interact with someone else, all the way to individuals who seek social interaction, but have extreme difficulty engaging in normal back and forth communication. For example, we might have an individual with autism who talks a lot, but has difficulty listening or engaging in meaningful conversations. Likewise, we might meet an individual with autism who does not engage in much conversation or seek to interact with others at all. The next criteria in the social communication category has to do with nonverbal communication (e.g. facial expressions, eye contact, gestures, posture, tone of voice) and, again, there is a range from those who use no nonverbal communication or lack facial expression all the way to those who have difficulty integrating eye contact, communication, and gaze to indicate what the meaning of what they’re talking about. Finally, the next criteria is that individuals with autism have difficulty and deficits when developing and maintaining relationships, so from those who appear to have no interest in interacting with other people or making friendships to those who have difficulty adjusting their

The social issues and communicative issues are very intertwined and the two factor model (social communication and restrictive, repetitive behaviors) of the DSM-5 has been supported by literature and the APA committee has come to a full agreement about the two domains that qualifies an individual for autism spectrum disorder. The rationale behind a merger between social interaction and communication into one category was for the reason that individuals use and need communication when engaging in social behaviors in their environment with other people (Carpenter et al. 1998). For instance, a child cannot engage in social greetings (e.g. saying hi, hello, good morning) or take part in back and forth conversation without language itself (e.g. sign, vocal). Furthermore, previous findings have shown that social and communicative skills are highly correlated with one another within a sample of children who have a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (Lord, 2011), hence another reason as to why the two domains merged into one single