American Psychiatric Association

Danny Carlat reports a stimulating time at the recent American Psychiatric Association meeting in New Orleans: She took a look at my name tag, and said, "Oh, I've heard about you."Since her expression was somewhere between stern and outright hostile, I queried, "In a good way or a bad way?""In a bad way, to tell you the truth." And then she was off on a high volume rant that went something (if memory serves) like this:"How DARE you write an article in the New York Times saying that your therapy training at Mass General was terrible, and then later having this GREAT AWAKENING that"--she…
I have suspected for some time now that the band oddly close process designed to produce the DSM-V --- the diagnostic statistical manual that is psychiatry's diagnostic guide and Bible --- would create an explosion of some sort. But I didn't think it would explode quite so soon. As Daniel Carlat outlines in a wonderful post â a must read, very high infotainment value â this is a pretty entertaining missing match. We have Allen Frances, a prominent psychiatrist who helped produce the previous edition of the DSM, leveling some very harsh criticisms of the process designed to produce a new…