The next revision of psychiatry's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)1 will be published in May 2013 and is the first revision of this psychiatric nomenclature in almost 2 decades. DSM-5 involved an international, multidisciplinary team of more than 400 individuals who volunteered vast amounts of their time throughout this 6-year official process, as well as many contributions from numerous international conferences that were held during the last decade.
Readers will recognize a few notable differences from DSM-IV. One distinction is DSM-5 's emphasis on numerous issues important to diagnosis and clinical care, including the influence of development, gender, and culture on the presentation of disorders.2 This is present in select diagnostic criteria, in text, or in both, which include variations of symptom presentations, risk factors, course, comorbidities, or other clinically useful information that might vary depending on a patient's gender, age, or cultural background. Another distinct feature is ensuring greater harmony between this North American classification system and the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) system. For example, the chapter structure of DSM now begins with those in which neurodevelopmental influences produce early-onset disorders in childhood. This restructuring brings greater alignment of DSM-5 to the structuring of disorders in the future ICD-11 but also reflects the manual's developmental emphasis, rather than the previous edition's sequestering of all childhood disorders to a separate chapter. A similar approach to harmonizing with the ICD was taken to promote a more conceptual relationship between DSM-5 and classifications in other areas of medicine, such as the classification of sleep disorders. > > > > Read More
