The origin of this new approach to psychiatry lies in a set of deficiencies of current psychiatric paradigm, concretely: Diagnostic inconsistencies that headed toward an alarming increase of mental disorders, and aslo pychopharmacologic inconsistencies regarding the role proconvulsant or anticonvulsant of different families of psychotropic substances.NEWPSYCHIATRY analyzed and criticized these incoherent, even contradictory, questions since its first publications, more than fifteen years ago. We...

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THE NIMH WITHDRAWS SUPPORT TO DSM-5 28/12/2015 -

The National Institute of Mental Health, the world´s largest funding agency for research into mental health, has indicated that it is withdrawing support for the manual.In a humiliating blow to the American Psychiatric Association, Thomas R. Insel, M.D., Director of the NIMH, made clear the agency would no longer fund research projects that rely exclusively on DSM criteria. Henceforth, the NIMH would be “re-orienting its research away from DSM categories.” "The weakness” of the manual, he explained in a sharply worded statement, “is its lack of validity.” Insel states: “Patients with mental disorders deserve better.


The agency´s year-and-a-half old attempt to devise an alternative to the DSM, its Research Domain Criteria (RDoC), stems from an effort, writes Insel, “to transform diagnosis by incorporating genetics, imaging, cognitive science, and other levels of information to lay the foundation for a new classification system.