Tag Archives: APA

04/11/23

Guild Interests Behind DSM Diagnosis

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Now in its 5th edition, the DSM-5-TR, the text revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, was released in March of 2022. This happened to be the first update in almost ten years and it’s selling very well for the APA, the American Psychiatric Association. The paperback version, as well as the hardback and desk reference editions, are the top four best sellers in psychiatry for Amazon. Saul Levin, the CEO and medical director for the APA told Axios that the public has been dying to know more about mental illness. “I think what really caught the imagination was that we’re sitting at home now and looking to say, ‘Boy, I’m feeling depressed — let me now go and find out more about it.'”

It’s hard to tell from this quote if Dr. Levin’s comment was a reflection of APA sales data for impulse buys for the DSM-5-TR, but I doubt it. A quick look at the Amazon prices DSM-5-TR indicates the paperback edition sells for $110.76 and the hardcover for $174.90. The desk reference editions are more affordable at $49.14 and $59.99. A better explanation for its bestselling sales is the fact that psychiatry in the U.S. and increasingly around the world has been dominated by the DSM for the past 70 years. Wired Magazine said this so-called bible for psychiatry is used in prisons, hospitals, and outpatient clinics to diagnose patients, prescribe medications, dictate future treatment and to justify payment for these services.

Axios reported how mental health has gone mainstream, with younger workers demand it as an employee benefit. Ralph Lewis, a Toronto-based psychiatrist, said in Psychology Today that psychiatry is guilty of having oversold its ability to answer the problems of coping with life and regulating one’s emotions and behaviors. Life can be stressful and complicated, leaving people with a feeling they can’t cope. “Many assume that psychiatry has the answers to problems of coping with life and regulating one’s own emotions and behaviors.” The expectations are particularly intense on psychiatrists as medical specialists “who are designated as the ultimate gatekeepers for diagnosis of mental illnesses and, more broadly, mental disorders.”

Mental disorders are, by their very nature, difficult to define with specificity. Anxiety and depression are the most common reasons for seeking psychiatric help. There is much confusion among the general public, and even often uncertainty among psychiatrists, as to when to consider these experiences mental disorders: the diagnosis depends on severity, number of associated symptoms, degree of functional impairment, and persistence or recurrence. Unfortunately, psychiatric diagnostic classification systems and mental health awareness campaigns have overgeneralized the definition of mental illness.

Dr. Lewis said the tendency now is to pathologize everyday problems, labeling them as mental disorders. Here he referenced Saving Normal, by Allen Frances, a psychiatrist and the former chair for the DSM-IV. Frances said there should have been cautions in the DSM-IV warning about overdiagnosis and providing tips on how to avoid it. Professional and public conferences, and educational campaigns should have been organized to counteract drug company propaganda.

None of this occurred to anyone at the time. No one dreamed that drug company advertising would explode three years after the publication of the DSM-IV or that there would be the huge epidemics of ADHD, autism, and bipolar disorder—and therefore no one felt any urgency to prevent them. . . We missed the boat.

See “Medieval Alchemy” for more on Allen Frances and Saving Normal.

Dr. Lewis said the COVID-19 pandemic drove up the rates of anxiety, depression and several other mental disorders. Ironically, while the data are complicated, there does not appear to have been much of a rise in the actual rate of mental disorders. What seems to have happened is people’s perception they need psychiatric treatment increased. Although some of the increase represents people now seeking help for significant problems, there is also a phenomenon of these diagnoses being sought.

A diagnosis offers a person an explanation for their difficulties. It lets a person feel understood. It simplifies complexity, helping make sense of things and bringing a bit of order to the inexplicable and chaotic. It provides validation and legitimacy to one’s struggles, as well as sympathy, and it might offer justification for one’s shortcomings or behavioral difficulties. It also confers a sense of identity and group-belonging.

A diagnosis may deliver practical benefits such as sick leave, disability benefits, academic accommodations, and insurance coverage for therapy. Other factors include social media, the internet, and celebrity influence—think about the attention paid to Simone Biles when she withdrew from several events at the 2020 Summer Olympics. And don’t forget about pharmaceutical advertising—just ask your doctor. “In many ways, what we are witnessing is the success of, and unintended consequences of, years of mental health education and destigmatization campaigns.”

Not only does overdiagnosis lead to over-prescribing medications, it also trivializes severe mental illness. The CDC said more than 50% of Americans will be diagnosed with a mental disorder in their lifetime. One in five will experience a mental illness in a given year. “If everyone has a mental disorder, then no one does, and the concept of mental disorder becomes meaningless. It becomes harder for the people most in need of psychiatric services to access the already overloaded system.”

The CDC also stated there was no single cause for mental illness. Early adverse life experiences, the use of alcohol or drugs, feelings of loneliness or isolation as well as biological factors or ongoing chronic medical conditions like cancer or diabetes can contribute to the risk of mental illness. But psychiatry continues to press for the medical model of mental illness and it seems defending the legitimacy of DSM diagnosis goes along with it. This debate has continued without any real movement towards a resolution for the last fifty years.

Dr. Daniel Morehead lamented in “The DSM: Diagnostic Manual or Diabolical Manipulation?” that it would be hard to overstate the torrents of criticism because of the DSM. He said, “The DSM has been, and remains, the centerpiece of contemporary critiques of psychiatry.” Critics of the DSM were wrong. Psychiatry is not at odds with other medical specialties. “Psychiatry differs from them only in the sense that more of the diseases behind psychiatric syndromes lack full explication.”

This is not evidence of its inferiority, according to Morehead, rather it is evidence of the complexity of the human brain. The DSM is “simply the place where clinicians match diseases to treatments through the lens of medical syndromes—just like other doctors.” This seems to be the heart of the debate and the reason for the vigor with which psychiatrists like Dr. Morehead defend the medical basis of psychiatry and psychiatric diagnosis. In another article published around the same time, “Let’s End the Destructive Habit of Doubting Psychiatric Illness,” he said it is time to permanently retire the idea that mental illness may not be fully medical. It is a “pernicious and misleading idea” and he challenged all psychiatrists to no longer tolerate it—publicly or privately.

Dr. Morehead and others appear to recognize that psychiatry is facing an institutional crisis unlike anything it faced since David Rosenhan published “Being Sane in Insane Places” in the journal Science in 1973. Rosenhan has eight “pseudopatients” seek admission to twelve different psychiatric hospitals. Once admitted, they stopped simulating any symptoms of abnormality and waited to see how long it took before they were released. Their length of stay ranged from 7 to 52 days, with an average length of stay at 19 days. None of the pseudopatients were identified as such by hospital staff members; but other patients did.

For more on the Rosenhan study, see “A Censored Story of Psychiatry,” Part 1 and Part 2.

In their book, Psychiatry Under the Influence, Robert Whitaker and Lisa Cosgrove said the trustees of the APA called a meeting shortly after Rosenhan’s article was published. They lamented how the public did not view psychiatry as a medical specialty. The trustees recommended the formation of a task force that would define mental illness and become a preamble to publish the DSM-III. And they made Robert Spitzer the chair of the task force in 1974. Whitaker and Cosgrove said from that beginning, the APA trustees saw how creating a new diagnostic manual could also serve a guild interest.

Remaking psychiatric diagnoses could be part of a larger effort by psychiatry to put forth a new image, which, metaphorically speaking, would emphasize that psychiatrists were doctors, and that they treat real “diseases.”

By adopting the disease model and asserting that psychiatric disorders were illnesses, the APA addressed both its critics and its image problem. Whitaker and Cosgrove said this happened when the organization metaphorically put on a white coat and presented itself as a medical specialty. “This was an image that resonated with the public.” With hindsight, they said, it is easy today to see the ethical peril for the APA that arose when the DSM-III was published. While the APA had devised a new diagnostic manual that helped remake its image, “the peril was that the guild interests might now affect the story it told to the public about the nature of mental disorders, and the efficacy of somatic treatments for them.”

In an interview for Medscape in 2020, the now former chair of the department of Psychiatry at Columbia and former president of the APA, Jeffery Liberman discussed “The Future of Psychiatric Diagnosis” and biomarkers with Melissa Arbuckle, also of Columbia University. She is the vice chair for education and training in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia. Robert Spitzer, the architect of the DSM-III, was a Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia until his retirement in 2003.

Lieberman acknowledged at the start of the interview there have been no biomarkers identified yet in research. “For the entire history of our discipline, as long as physicians have studied mental illness, we have not had a diagnostic test for it. It’s a clinical diagnosis.” Nevertheless, he has faith that someday there will be a diagnostic test for mental illness: “I do believe that certainly within my professional lifetime, and hopefully sooner rather than later, we will see a diagnostic test.”

The APA self-consciously tied its fate to the DSM in the aftermath of the institutional crisis after the Rosenhan study. It seems to have done so at least partially to affirm itself as a legitimate medical specialty, with the power and authority to prescribe medications. As T. M. Luhrmann noted in Of Two Minds, “psychopharmacology is the great silent dominatrix of contemporary psychiatry.” Prescribing medications is what psychiatrists do that other mental health professionals cannot do. “And as mental health jobs become defined more by their professional specificity, more and more psychiatrists spend more of their time prescribing medication.”

The disease model of mental illness has been a tremendous asset in the fight against stigma and the fight for parity in health care coverage. And it is clear that the disease model captures a good measure of the truth. Mental illness often has an organic quality. People can’t just pull themselves back together when they are hearing voices or contemplating suicide, and their illness is rarely caused by bad parenting alone. Yet to stop at that model, to say that mental illness is nothing but disease, is like saying that an opera is nothing but musical notes. It impoverished us. It impoverishes our sense of human possibility. (Of Two Minds, p. 266)

12/18/18

The Death of Grief

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The field of psychiatric diagnosis suffered a significant loss in the spring of 2013 with the death of the bereavement exclusion. It was not a peaceful ending, as several experts fought desperately to keep it alive within DSM-5. But the efforts of psychologists like Joann Cacciatore and psychiatrists such as Allen Frances were not successful. The American Psychiatric Association published the DSM-5 without the bereavement exclusion and effectively eliminated any diagnostic distinction between bereavement and major depression. Grief, for all intensive purposes, was dead.

Dr. Joann Cacciatore, a psychologist who specializes in counseling individuals affected by traumatic death, lamented this passing in her article, “The Death of Grief, the Birth of Mental Illness.” She said: “Grief is not a disease, it is not an illness, it is not depression. It is in fact, an expression of love. Grief can only be a disease if love is.” She noted how the change increased the likelihood that grief would be misdiagnosed as Major Depressive Disorder and then mistakenly treated with psychotropic medications. “There is no sound evidence that they are effective for grief. Research shows that bereaved parents are already medicated earlier than can be justified by current evidence.”

We are saddened and disappointed by the recent announcement that the DSM-5 task force has finalized the decision to eliminate the bereavement exclusion from the Major Depressive Disorder diagnosis in the upcoming edition of the manual. This move will allow clinicians, including counselors, general physicians, social workers, and psychiatrists, to diagnose a major mental disorder in bereaved parents and other grieving individuals as early as two weeks following the death of a loved one should they meet the DSM-5’s criteria for depression. Importantly, many of you will recognize these criteria which include sadness, feelings of emptiness, crying, sleep and weight changes, guilt and regrets, and loss of interest or energy. Yet, all of these symptoms are quite common in grief, and particularly after the death of a baby or child which evokes enduring and intense reactions in parents.

Allen Frances, a psychiatrist and chair of the DSM-IV, repeatedly pleaded with the APA to not medicalize grief in “Last Plea to DSM 5: Save Grief from the Drug Companies.” He even ranked it as the second worst mistake within the DSM-5. He noted it would be a “bonanza for drug companies, but a disaster for grievers.” Frances referenced and quoted the concerns of Joann Cacciatore, Russell Friedman (the co-founder of The Grief Recovery Institute Educational Foundation) and Jerry Wakefield, a professor of Social Work. Frances said: “The DSM 5 medicalization of grief has been opposed by editorials and scientific papers in the major medical and scientific journals, by hundreds of newspaper  articles.”

After 40 years and lots of clinical experience, I can’t distinguish at two weeks between the symptoms of normal grief and the symptoms of mild depression- and I challenge anyone else to do so. This is an inherently unreliable distinction. And I know damn well that primary care doctors can’t do it in a 7 minute visit. This should have been the most crucial point in DSM 5 decision making because primary care docs prescribe 80% of all antidepressants and will be most likely to misuse the DSM 5 in mislabeling grievers. . . . Grief is a normal and inescapable part of the human condition, not to be confused with psychiatric illness. Let us respect the dignity of mourning and treat it medically only when it becomes melancholia.

Another eminent psychiatrist, Ronald Pies, disagreed with Allen Frances. He believes eliminating the bereavement exclusion was a reasonable decision. Pies said grief and depression are distinct constructs and bereavement does not “immunize” the person from major depression. He said the bereavement exclusion was removed from the DSM-5 for two main reasons: 1) major depression is potentially a lethal disorder, “with an overall suicide rate of about four percent”; and 2) there is no clinical or scientific evidence to distinguish bereavement-related grief from major depression. “Disqualifying a patient from a diagnosis of major depression” after the death of a loved one “closes the door on potentially life-saving interventions” (meaning medication).

It is important to understand that the DSM-5 criteria merely allow the diagnosis of MDD when the recently bereaved person meets all required symptom, severity, duration, and impairment criteria for MDD. Nothing in the manual compels a diagnosis of MDD shortly after bereavement.

In conclusion, Pies said while normal grief should not be medicalized, neither should major depression be normalized simply because it occurred “in the context of recent bereavement.” Dr. Pies seems to be arguing that the problems of a “falsely positive” in diagnosis of major depression in the context of bereavement are outweighed by the dangers from a “false negative” in diagnosis. Yet there are some who would strongly dispute this conclusion. Instead they see removing the bereavement exclusion as an example of how psychiatry relentlessly seeks to expand its reach.

In “Elimination of the Bereavement Exclusion: History and Implications,” psychologist Philip Hickey gave a history of the DSM and how the bereavement exclusion was first added, then whittled away over time. He noted how the DSM-I did not suggest its “disorders” were chemical imbalances or “illnesses-just-like-diabetes.” Rather, the “disorders” were conceived as reactions of the personality and believed to be of  “psychogenic origin.” Hickey then gave a couple of quotes from the DSM-I illustrating his point.

The emphasis on psychological explanations was not merely a reflection of Adolf Meyer’s influence, but a reflection of the fact that a great many psychiatrists at that time (1952) subscribed to this position and were entirely comfortable with these types of psychoanalytic explanations.

But the introduction of antipsychotic and antidepressant medications in the 1950’s changed things. They offered a pathway to “prima facie medical legitimacy.” What was needed was a label that posed as a diagnosis; time for a 15-minute med check; and a quickly-written prescription. “No longer would it be necessary to delve collaboratively and time-consumingly into a client’s childhood conflicts, current fears, or counter-productive relationships.” Don’t be too quick to dismiss Hickey’s rhetoric. In an address to the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology in 2000, Allen Frances said the DSM system and psychopharmacology grew up together “and have had a strong influence upon one another.”

The psychopharmacological revolution required that there be a method of more systematic and reliable psychiatric diagnosis. This provided the major impetus for the development of the structured assessments and the research diagnostic criteria that were the immediate forerunners of DSM-III. In turn, the availability of well-defined psychiatric diagnoses stimulated the development of specific treatments and increasingly sophisticated psychopharmacological studies.

Hickey said as more psychiatric drugs came to market in the 1960s, “it became increasingly clear the psychogenic framework of the DSM-I had to go.” Thus a movement to develop a cause-neutral diagnostic system began with the DSM-II and continued on through the DSM-III under the guidance of Robert Spitzer.  The concept of cause-neutrality, according to Hickey, meant that: “regardless of why a person is despondent, if he scores five or more yeses on the checklist, he has major depression, the ‘illness,’ and therefore needs medical treatment.” Over time, as the use of DSM diagnostic criteria became central to the conceptualization of depression and grief, the bereavement exclusion included by Robert Spitzer in the DSM-III seemed more and more problematic for mainline psychiatry. And bereavement as a cause of grief-related depression became increasingly irrelevant.

The death of grief is inversely related to the birth and growth of what Hickey called the biological-pathology perspective. The bereavement exclusion was finally pronounced dead with the publication of DSM-5 in 2013. “The bogus cause-neutral perspective (in reality the bogus biological-pathology perspective) was now the de facto psychiatric position, with no exceptions.”

The notion that one can gain an understanding of a person’s sadness by ignoring its causes and contexts, and simply bumping his superficial presentation against a fabricated checklist, and seeing if he scores hits on at least five, is simply inane. It’s like trying to understand a poem by counting the words. Anyone with the slightest compassion or understanding of human experience can see this.

For more on the concerns with psychiatric diagnosis see: “Where There’s Smoke …” and “Psychiatric Huffing and Puffing.” For more on the APA actions on bereavement, see: “Pathologizing Grief.”

 

01/3/17

Like Footprints in the Sand

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An amazing letter was sent to the president of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) on August 1, 2016 by no less than sixteen well known medical and psychological professionals from around the globe. They are attempting to have an article published in a 2004 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry retracted. Their concern was that a recent analysis of that study found “gross misrepresentations” made in the article with regard to use of citalopram (Celexa) in treating child and adolescent depression. As of the beginning of December of 2016, the original journal article is still available; nor does there seem to have been any response to the letter requesting the retraction. Perhaps the APA hopes that if they simply ignore the issue, it will just go away.

The article was ghostwritten by agents of the manufacturer and seriously misrepresented both the effectiveness and the safety of citalopram in treating child and adolescent depression.

The letter was addressed to Dr. Maria Oquendo, the 2016 President of the APA. The coauthors of the letter expressed concerns with the “gross misrepresentations” made within the 2004 article, “A Randomized, Placebo-Controlled Trial of Citalopram for the Treatment of Major Depression in Children and Adolescents.”

Since the publication of the analysis alleging the problems with the 2004 Celexa article, there were three different attempts to have it retracted. In response to a May 9, 2016 letter, the current editor for the American Journal of Psychiatry refused to retract the original study. Two other attempts, one to the former editor of the American Journal of Psychiatry who accepted the article, received no response. Given the failure of the American Journal of Psychiatry to retract the article, the letter’s authors are concerned that children and adolescents are put at risk of unnecessary harm because well-intentioned physicians who continue to prescribe citalopram to children and adolescents are being misled.

The 2004 citalopram study said it provided evidence that “citalopram produces a statistically and clinically significant reduction in depressive symptoms in children and adolescents.” It was said to be superior to placebo and the adverse events were mild.

In conclusion, citalopram treatment significantly improved depressive symptoms compared with placebo within 1 week in this population of children and adolescents. No serious adverse events were reported, and the rate of discontinuation due to adverse events among citalopram-treated patients was comparable to that of placebo. These findings further support the use of citalopram in children and adolescents suffering from major depression.

Yet there have been a series of lawsuits against Forest Laboratories, the manufacturer of Celexa, because of its serious side effects; and for Forrest’s failure to warn about the risks when using Celexa and other SSRIs. Drugwatch noted that Celexa is the best-selling antidepressant in 13 countries. Yet it has been linked to several congenital birth defects as well as autism. FindLaw noted evidence that Celexa and other antidepressants have been linked to an increased risk of suicidal behavior in patients under the age of 25.

Forest Laboratories also pleaded guilty in a 2010 criminal case for misbranding Celexa for a use not approved by the FDA. “According to the Department of Justice, Forest Pharmaceuticals had illegally promoted Celexa for the treatment of depression in children and adolescents. The company also pleaded guilty to obstructing justice and distributing an unapproved drug.” Forest Pharmaceuticals was fined $150 million.

A class action law suit, Celexa and Lexapro Marketing and Sales Practice Litigation, was brought by plaintiffs who alleged that Forest Laboratories misrepresented the safety and efficacy of Celexa and Lexapro when marketing the drugs for off-label pediatric use. Over 63,000 documents from Forest were deposited in a database maintained by the plaintiff’s attorneys. Jureidini, Amsterdam and McHenry reviewed 750 internal documents from this database in their 2016 article for the International Journal of Risk & Safety in Medicine.

They found that the published article, “A Randomized, Placebo-Controlled Trial of Citalopram for the Treatment of Major Depression in Children and Adolescents,” contained efficacy and safety data that was inconsistent with the protocol criteria. Although the published article concluded citalopram was safe and significantly more efficacious than placebo for children and adolescents, the outcome measures “showed no statistically significant differences between citalopram and placebo.”

Unreported procedural deviations contributed to the claimed statistical significance of the primary outcome and negative secondary outcomes were not reported. Moreover, post hoc measures were introduced; and adverse events were misleadingly analyzed. The Wagner et al. citalopram study failed to mention five citalopram-treated subjects who discontinued treatment due to hypomania, agitation, or akathisia. “None of these potentially dangerous states of over-arousal occurred with placebo.” There were also many more adverse gastrointestinal events for citalopram than placebo. Yet the final report grouped the data in a way that masked the evidence for potential gastrointestinal intolerance.

In conclusion, corporate mischaracterisation of clinical trial results is of concern in psychiatry where outcome measures are more subjective and easily manipulated. Because few industry-sponsored studies gain public scrutiny and even fewer are ever formally retracted, it is important to make these articles transparent to correct the scientific record. It is furthermore imperative to inform the medical community of mischaracterized data that could lead to potential harm to children and adolescents who are vulnerable to the effects of medication on the growing brain and may increase suicidal thinking and behaviour.

STAT News reported the retraction request comes after years of controversy over the extent to which some drug makers massaged clinical studies to broaden their medicines’ market. Four years ago, GlaxoSmithKline paid $3 billion to settle civil and criminal charges of “preparing, publishing, and distributing a misleading journal article” about the use Paxil with children and adolescents. “The pill had not been approved for that use and the study cited by federal authorities had been ghostwritten.” David Healy, John Nardo, and Jon Jureidini, three of the sixteen individuals who submitted the letter to the APA requesting that the 2004 citalopram study be retracted, have been actively involved in critiquing the misrepresentation of Study 329 and attempting to get it retracted as well. See a series of articles Healy has written on this issue here, in the Mad in America archives.

After a running a gauntlet of reviews, Le Noury et al. were able to successfully publish a reanalysis of Study 329 in the British Medical Journal. But getting there wasn’t easy, see: “Restoring Study 329: Letter to BMJ” and “The Troubled Life of Study 329: Consequences of Failure to Retract.” However, the original article, “Efficacy of Paroxetine in the Treatment of Adolescent Major Depression, A Randomized Controlled Trial,” was never retracted by Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (JAACAP).

Hmmm. Perhaps my opening comment that the APA is hoping the request to withdraw the 2004 citlopram article, “A Randomized, Placebo-Controlled Trial of Citalopram for the Treatment of Major Depression in Children and Adolescents,” wasn’t all that smarmy. They could be hoping that it will just fade away like footprints in the sand.

12/24/14

Where There’s Smoke …

As much as 4 ½ years before the publication of the DSM-5, there was growing public criticism of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and the process they used to develop it. The amazing thing about this criticism is that it was from within the ranks of psychiatry itself … by psychiatrists who had been in charge of previous revisions of the DSM.

In a 2008 article, Benedict Carey of the New York Times pointed out the importance of the DSM as a “medical guidebook and a cultural institution.” It is used to help doctors make diagnoses and to provide diagnostic codes to insurance companies. The National Institute of Mental Health made the use of DSM criteria a requirement for funding research. But for the first time, the APA required its DSM contributors to sign a nondisclosure agreement.

Research psychiatrist Robert Spitzer said that when he first heard about the agreement, he went “bonkers.” Spitzer said: “Transparency is necessary if the document is to have credibility, and, in time, you’re going to have people complaining all over the place that they didn’t have the opportunity to challenge anything.”

Robert Spitzer, the chair of the “landmark” third edition of the DSM, has been hailed as the rescuer or savior of psychiatry. Allen Frances, the chair of the 4th edition of the DSM said in his book, Saving Normal, that Spitzer was a rare man. “Without Robert Spitzer, psychiatry might have become increasingly irrelevant.” Even critics of modern psychiatric diagnosis, such the authors of the book Mad Science, acknowledge Spitzer’s importance to psychiatry: “Robert Spitzer was a most unlikely rescuer of American psychiatry.”

On June 26, 2009, Frances published an article in the Psychiatric Times where he identified what he saw a grave problems with the DSM-5. He also was critical of the lack of transparency. Pointing to his own efforts with the DSM-IV, he said their goal had been to ensure that everyone would understand what they were doing and how they were going about it. “There was explicit accountability for decision making on all changes.” He cautioned against the stated ambition to effect a “paradigm shift” in psychiatric diagnosis with the DSM-5.

So long as psychiatric diagnosis is stuck at its current descriptive level, there is little to be gained and much to be lost in frequently and arbitrarily changing the system. Descriptive diagnosis should remain fairly stable until, disorder by disorder, we gradually attain a more fundamental and explanatory understanding of causality.

Frances specified his concerns with the DSM-5 process, which included the following: 1) there was no scientific basis to justify a paradigm shift in psychiatric diagnosis at this time; 2) there was a failure to provide clear methodological guidelines on the level of empirical support for the changes; 3) there was a failure to be open to wide scrutiny and useful criticism; 4) there was a failure to set and meet clear timelines; there was a likelihood that time pressure would lead to an unconsidered rush on last-minute decisions.

The members of the APA working on the DSM-5, including the DSM-5 Chair, David Kupfer, responded to Frances on July 1, 2009. They suggested that both Spitzer and Frances were repeating “factual errors and assumptions” about the development of the DSM-5. After their refutation of the concerns expressed by Frances, they stated:

Both Dr. Frances and Dr. Spitzer have more than a personal “pride of authorship” interest in preserving the DSM-IV and its related case book and study products. Both continue to receive royalties on DSM-IV associated products. The fact that Dr. Frances was informed at the APA Annual Meeting last month that subsequent editions of his DSM-IV associated products would cease when the new edition is finalized, should be considered when evaluating his critique and its timing.

Robert Spitzer responded to the criticisms raised about Allen Frances and himself on July 2, 2009. Spitzer noted how the DSM-5 debate had taken an ugly turn, by suggesting that he and Frances were critiquing the DSM for financial reasons. He limited his comments to what he saw as the core issue of transparency. After raising a series of questions with regard to the opaqueness and “empty rhetoric” on the DSM-5 as the most open and inclusive DSM ever, Spitzer saw two possible reasons for the lack of transparency. First, the answers to his questions were known, but for some reason, the DSM leadership was withholding it; perhaps to shield themselves from criticisms. A second possibility was that the DSM-5 leadership didn’t know the answers to his questions. “Given their plan to publish DSM-V in May 2012, if the second possibility is the case, it is inconceivable that this publication deadline could realistically be met. “

Both Spitzer and Frances continued their challenges to the process of review and approval of the DSM-5 by the APA and gained more support and even some victories. You can also read a more detailed description of the dispute here. The publication of the DSM-5 was delayed until May of 2013, but the controversy merely grew. Allen Frances became one of the most vocal critics of the DSM-5, with multiple blogs and articles looking at the problems and concerns. He’s even written two books, Saving Normal and Essentials of Psychiatric Diagnosis as a result of this controversy. You can scroll through some of his articles on the Huffington Post for starters.

Oh and with regard to the veiled accusation of Spitzer and Frances criticizing the DSM-5 for financial reasons, David Kupfer, Chair of the DSM-5 Task Force, has been outed for failing to report financial interests in Adaptive Testing Technologies, a company that designs tests and implements large scale adaptive testing systems for mental health assessment. After an investigation, the APA said (Letter-to-Assembly-20140114.pdf; now removed from the APA website): “Dr. Kupfer should have disclosed to APA his interest in PAI in 2012.” However, it did not find that his interest in PAI had any influence on DSM-5’s inclusion of dimensional measures for further study in Section 3. One blogger, 1 Boring Old Man said:

It seems like Dr. Kupfer et al. are pursuing a strategy of only acknowledging this particular Conflict of Interest when forced, as in the situation with JAMA Psychiatry, and avoiding talking about it otherwise – mirrored so far by the APA President and Board of Trustees.

 

09/3/14

Psychiatry Has No Clothes

On April 29th of 2013, there was an astounding blog post by Thomas Insel, the Director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). He said that although the DSM-5 was due to be released in a few weeks, the NIMH would be “re-orienting its research away from DSM categories.” He noted that while the DSM has been referred to as a “Bible” for the field of mental health, “It is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each.” Did you get that? The Director of the NIMH said the DSM was a “dictionary” that created “labels.” It was not, then functioning adequately, in his opinion, as its title suggests: as a Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders! (emphasis added)

Insel said its strength had been “reliability”, meaning that it provided a way for clinicians to use the same terms in the same way. Its weakness was that it lacked validity. DSM diagnoses are based upon a consensus about clusters of symptoms and not any objective laboratory measure. “In the rest of medicine, that would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain or the quality of fever.”

Insel was not using “reliability” in a statistical sense. In “The Myth of the Reliability of DSM,” Stuart Kirk and Herb Kutchins demonstrated conclusively that the DSM-III and DSM-IIIR were not statistically reliable. In fact, using the same statistic that Robert Spitzer used to justify the major changes to the DSM in the 1970s, they demonstrated that:

The reliability problem is much the same as it was 30 years ago [before the DSM-III]. Only now the current developers of the DSM-IV have de-emphasised the reliability problem and claim to be scientifically solving other problems.

Unfortunately, the tables in Figures 1 and 2 have been removed from the online version of their article. But the tables are still available in the original article found in the Journal of Mind and Behavior, 15 (1&2), 1994, p. 71-86. These tables plainly showed how the DSM statistical reliability was not what it was claimed to be. The Selling of the DSM (1992) by Stuart Kirk and Herb Kutchins has the tables. And there is a graphic comparison of the data within Mad Science (2013) by Stuart Kirk, Tomi Gomory, and David Cohen.

Insel went on in his blog to say that the NIMH will be supporting research projects that “look across current categories” or sub-divide them in order to begin to develop a better system. “We are committed to new and better treatments, but we feel this will only happen by developing a more precise diagnostic system.” In order to work towards that goal, the NIMH launched the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC). RDoC is only a research framework for now; a decade-long project that is just beginning. You can learn more about RDoC here (on the NIMH website).

Robert Whitaker, author of Anatomy of an Epidemic, said in a March 2014 interview that Insel stating that the DSM lacked validity was an acknowledgement the “disease model” has failed as a basis for making psychiatric diagnoses.

When Insel states that the disorders haven’t been validated, he is stating that the entire edifice that modern psychiatry is built upon is flawed, and unsupported by science. That is like the King of Psychiatry saying that the discipline has no clothes. If the public loses faith in the DSM and comes to see it as unscientific, then psychiatry has a real credibility problem on its hands.

Two weeks later on May 13, 2013, a joint press release was made by Thomas Insel and Jeffrey Liebermann, the President-elect of the American Psychiatric Association (APA). They said that the NIMH and the APA had a shared interest to ensure that patients and healthcare providers had “the best available tools and information” to identify and treat mental health issues.

Today, the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), along with the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) represents the best information currently available for clinical diagnosis of mental disorders. . . . The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) has not changed its position on DSM-5. As NIMH’s Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) project website states: “The diagnostic categories represented in the DSM-IV and the International Classification of Diseases-10 (ICD-10, containing virtually identical disorder codes) remain the contemporary consensus standard for how mental disorders are diagnosed and treated.”

The DSM and RDoC were said to be complementary, not competing frameworks. As research findings emerge from RDoC, they may be incorporated into future DSM revisions. “But this is a long-term undertaking. It will take years to fulfill the promise that this research effort represents for transforming the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders.”

Saul Levine, the CEO and Medical Director of the APA said on May 5, 2014 that the DSM and the RDoC will “begin to come together” as the research from NIMH is included into the way they diagnose mental illness. They know that mental illness and substance use disorders are a bio-psycho-social illness. “We work very well together with NIMH. And I think that the whole field is looking to the science coming out of NIMH to include it as a way to help get better treatment for patients in this country.”

So the APA and NIMH affirm they are working towards the same goals as complementary research frameworks. Someday the research findings of RDoC may even be included into the DSM. But until then, the NIMH will have to continue to “ooh and aah” at the APA’s DSM and ignore the nay-sayers crying: “Look at the DSM; look at the DSM!” Also see my blog post, “Psychiatry’s Mythical Phoenix.”