Criticism towards the DSM-5
Although DSM-5 has made some positive revisions compared with its previous editions, critics still argued that the DSM-5 led to the diagnostic inflation even worse. As the chair of the DSM-4 task force, Frances argued that DSM-4 already caused serious overdiagnosis, and the DSM-5 caused the inflation even worse (2012). The major criticisms towards the DSM-5 were diagnostic hyperinflation and over-medication in treatments caused by the guide of this manual. Also, the problem of its ambiguous language was still not solved. Lastly, the purpose of the DSM-5 was questioned because critics doubted whether the DSM-5 was a guide for psychiatrists or a tool for making profits.
First, the changes from the DSM-4 to the …show more content…
Promoters of cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) argued that the misusage of language in the DSM-5 had a negative impact to offer the most effective method to help people who needed assistance. If some criteria and symptoms listed in the DSM-5 could be disentangled without medicine, they were not diseases. As a psychiatrist who employed CBT as her primary method, Beck defined CBT as a psychotherapy that helped people “to change their unhelpful thinking and behaviour” (2011 p.19-20). If someone washed hands frequently, this behaviour could be diagnosed as obsessive compulsive and related disorders (OCRD) according to the criteria of DSM-5. However, Beck argued that washing hands was just behaviour, not an illness. As a result, medical treatment was unnecessary even harmful. CBT employed a different approach because it highly relied on the communication and teaching coping skills (Beck 2011). CBT therapists attempted to help people rather than treat them. To psychiatrist who advocated CBT, unhelpful thinking and behaviour was not equal to illness. In single use term, CBT was even more effective to cope with depression, OCRD, Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) than medical treatment in many cases (Beck 2011). Frances (2014) argued that the core …show more content…
Many psychiatrists still attempted to broaden the content of DSM-5, and one typical example was the attempt to add nomophobia into the DSM-5. A typical example was that a growing number of people used their smartphones frequently in modern society. To some psychiatrists, the infatuation of smartphone was a new type mental illness called nomophobia. Psychiatrists Bragazzi and Puente (2014) wrote a proposal to insist that nomophobia should be included in the DSM-5 because nomophobia is a “pathological fear” of being out of contact with a mobile phone (Bragazzi & Puente, 2014 p.156). Nomophobia was considered an illness based on the usage of language in its definition. In order to validate this proposal, many psychiatrists did a lot of investigations and research. For instance, twenty percentages of young adults will check their phones while they have sexual intercourse (Duffy 2015). To these psychiatrists, this behaviour was abnormal and dysfunctional. Thus, it could be a positive symptom to define nomophobia as an illness. However, the proposal about nomophobia was highly controversial. The study by King et al. (2013) indicated that both medication and CBT treatment were effective to reduce the time of using smartphones and increased exposure to real-life situation. The result did not support that nomophobia was an illness, because it could be controlled based