The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) has announced that it will be “re-orienting its research away from” categories based on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).
NIMH director Tom Insel announced the change on 29 April, just weeks before the American Psychiatric Association’s planned release of the fifth edition of the DSM. The NIMH is part of the National Institutes of Health, and is the world’s largest funder of mental health research.
“While the DSM has been described as a bible for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each,” Insel wrote in a blog post. “The strength of each of the editions of the DSM has been ‘reliability’—each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways,” Insel stated in a blog post. But he said the DSM’s weakness is its lack of validity.
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