Every month or so, someone (usually very smart and passionate) sends me a detailed proposal for a new diagnostic system offered as an alternative to the jumbled, pedestrian, atheoretical, and purely descriptive method used in DSM. The new system is invariably theory driven, clever, neat, and plausible. Surely, it is quite easy to be more coherent than a DSM that consists of a jumble of disorders gathered together largely through a historical accreting process based mostly on clinical observation and descriptive research -- without an underlying theory or deep knowledge of causality.
The new systems come in three types: 1) Brain biology: these used to be based on correlates with neurotransmitters, but recently neural networks of various kinds are much more popular; 2) Psychological dimensions: hundreds of scales have been developed and carefully tested; and 3) Systems based on psychodynamic, ethological, and developmental models -- less popular now than they once were.
Unfortunately, none of these approaches, however elegant, is remotely ready for inclusion in the official system of psychiatric nomenclature. DSM must by its very nature be a conservative document that follows and never leads the field. The problem with all of the suggestions to replace the admitted DSM jumble is that there are so many contenders, none of which has been proven or has attained wide acceptance from the field. It is also not possible to choose one from among so many plausible, but necessarily parochial systems, when most clinicians have absolutely no interest in any of them and the proponents of rival systems can make about equally valid claims for their respective pet methods.
The DSM-IV experience with the personality disorders was a rude and disheartening awakening. I very much hoped to include at least an optional dimensional personality rating scale. We were able to gather together in one room the proponents of all the competing dimensional systems to attempt the selection of one or some compromise among them. It didn't work; we could not forge a consensus because each participant remained wedded to his own scale (however minimally different it was from its near neighbors). Without wide agreement, it is impossible to force a field to accept changes that represent one necessarily narrowly defined perspective. The DSM-5 effort to include personality dimensions will also undoubtedly fail -- for this reason as well as for its unbelievably byzantine complexity.
I feel sure that our clumsy descriptive classification may not be the only, or even the optimal way, to sort things for future research. But I feel equally certain that DSM remains necessary to carry forth the current, everyday, practical clinical and administrative work that are its first priority. Once we have attained a widely accepted, etiological understanding of at least some forms of psychopathology, the new insights will gradually replace our clumsy, but nonetheless now still useful system.
At this stage in this arena, the wisdom of the philosopher Vico trumps the much greater and better-known Descartes. Descartes sought to use what we now call Cartesian rationality and mathematical order to sort what were previously seemingly disorderly phenomena. This turned out to be a screaming success in the mathematical, physical and chemical worlds, but has (as Vico predicted) much less purchase in understanding the sloppy complicatedness of human affairs, including psychiatric diagnosis.
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