Main description:

As one of the few books to thoroughly examine the critical problem of over-diagnosis in psychiatry today, Dr. Joel Paris - author of The Intelligent Clinician's Guide to the DSM-5 (R) - shows how over-diagnosis leads to over-treatment in Overdiagnosis in Psychiatry: How Modern Psychiatry Lost Its Way While Creating a Diagnosis for Almost All of Life's Misfortune.

Leaving no stone unturned, Dr. Paris considers the complications of the DSM-5 system with particular reference to major depression, bipolar disorder, PTSD and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. While each of these conditions have given rise to diagnostic fads and epidemics, the classification of mental disorders remains provisional without any biomarkers for mental disorders. Because of this, Dr. Paris makes the case for the importance of conservative diagnoses, recognizing that normal
variants are not necessarily disorders.

Contents:

Introduction ; Part I: Background ; Chapter 1-Diagnosis in psychiatry ; Chapter 2-DSM and its discontents ; Chapter 3-Over-diagnosis and overtreatment ; Chapter 4- Science, philosophy and diagnosis ; Part II: Categories Most Likely to Be Over-diagnosed ; Chapter 5: How <"major>" is major depression? ; Chapter 6: The boundaries of bipolarity ; Chapter 7: PTSD and trauma ; Chapter 8-ADHD and attention ; Chapter 9-Personality and personality disorder ; Chapter 10-Other disorders in which over-diagnosis is a risk ; Part III: Diagnosis and Normality ; Chapter 11-How do we know what is normal? ; Chapter 12-Where do we go from here?