May 26, 2009

Embitterment disorder: The latest from DSM-V

My regular readers know all about the DSM-V revision controversies (click HERE for more), and the efforts of some psychiatrists to make the manual ever-more-expansive, until just about nearly every human condition becomes a formal pathology.

But, really, folks. Post-traumatic embitterment disorder? Isn't that going a bit far?

The L.A. Times' Shari Roan has the story of how some psychiatrists want to create a formal label for embittered people bent on revenge. We all know them; now we'll have a handy-dandy acronym -- PTED -- by which to refer to them.

The article is part of Ms. Roan's ongoing coverage of the heated DSM debates at the American Psychiatric Convention in San Francisco. Today's coverage is here.

MORE DSM NEWS: A letter in the current New England Journal of Medicine on the pharmaceutical influence over the DSM-V development process, and the resultant "crisis of credibility" in psychiatry, is online HERE. The authors are Lisa Cosgrove, Ph.D., of the University of Massachusetts; Harold J. Bursztajn, M.D., of Harvard Medical School; and Sheldon Krimsky, Ph.D., of Tufts University.

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