DSM-IV
ddobbs | June 30, 2009I 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…
ddobbs | March 16, 2009Below are materials supplementing my story "The Post-Traumatic Stress Trap," Scientific American, April 2009. (You can find the story here and my blog post introducing it here.) I'm starting with annotated sources, source materials, and a bit of multimedia. I hope to add a couple sidebars that didn't fit in the main piece -- though those may end up at the main blog, so you may want to keep an eye there or subscribe via RSS or Atom.
Main sources and documents in "The Post-Traumatic Stress Trap."
These are organized by story section, roughly in the order the relevant material appears.…
ddobbs | March 14, 2009
My story in the April 2009 Scientific American story, "The Post-Traumatic Stress Trap", just went online. Here's the opening:
In 2006, soon after returning from military service in Ramadi, Iraq, during the bloodiest
period of the war, Captain Matt Stevens of the Vermont National Guard began to have a problem with PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder. Stevens's problem was not that he had PTSD. It was that he began to have doubts about PTSD: the condition was real enough, but as a diagnosis he saw it being wildly, even dangerously, overextended.
[snip]
"Clinicians aren't separating the…