Open Letter to the DSM-5

After Covid everything that I was trying to treat for my health is 200%+ worse. With the additional pressure from my ex non compliance with joint shard custody order and visitation and I feel betrayed and afraid she’s the last to graduate and her step mothers toxic need to emotionally hurt our children.

It's important to keep the dsm in check

Muy bien por su trabajo, ya que el DSM, siempre ha venido progresivamente con demasiadas distorsiones en sus Dx, quizá por la gran influencia mercantilista de la farmacología sin importarles la salud; llevando a empeorar criterios que deben de ser objetivos. Consideremos que ante esta nueva realidad, debemos de manejar nuevos Dxs. Yo manejo Psicoterapias no convencionales por lo que mis Dxs. son interaccionales, y realmente que son los mejores. Muchas gracias y éxitos

Safeguards are insufficient. Reduce the number of classifications so that individuals are counselled and not institutionalised. We need to reduce the institutional population and medicinal regimentation.

Revisions are urgently needed in the DSM5. I feel that the categorization of these conditions are placed only to serve a purpose for the pharmaceutical companies which attach particular treatment namely drugs to each diagnosis without proper thorough assesment and resourses, I feel it is quite dangerous to have a tick box diagnosis on people and label them on thier records, when there could instead be a therapy such as councilling or other non invasive form of treatment and help for people with normal reactions to lifes ups and downs, this would give a temporary diagnosis rather than a permanent diagnosis which is currently too easy to place people under that umberella, I am concerned that the medical community find drugs and diagnosis go hand in hand. I am not concerned for myself as I do not have any conditions but I am concerned for the health and safety of both our youth and our elderly, by this I mean, I want them protected against being wrongly diagnosed and therefore wrongly prescribed drugs which often times are experimental and or addictive with side affects.

I am a PsyD student and through my education and interactions with supervisors and other clinicians I have noted the almost dogmatic way individuals stick to the DSM-5 and how this more medically-modeled way of thinking has frequently endangered the well-being of clients. I would urge the Task Force to take this petition seriously, as well as many prior petitions that have been made to reduce the pathologizing of vulnerable populations and regular human experiences, in the interest of having now and future clinicians in both psychology and psychiatry follow a more collaborative model of diagnosis.

I am concerned by the lack of scientific foundation (e.g., lack of reliability and validit) for DSM and its assumption that the causes of mental suffering are rrelevantle. I am hoping that the Power, Threat, Menaning Framework, British Psychological Society, Clinical Division, will someday replace dsm and icd. https://www.bps.org.uk/power-threat-meaning-framework

I have a Master’s Degree in Psychology and am also a victim of diagnostic inflation. Heat stroke/Heat exhaustion led to a call to my employer without my consent. The employee who answered I repeatedly reported for bringing an alcoholic beverage to work with him every day. He told the doctor that I had been acting sped up and told stories that made no sense. Despite the fact that I hadn’t been there in 2 1/2 months. He also told my mother that I had been fired. Nonetheless, the doctor, unaware of both facts, diagnosed me with bipolar disorder despite my being 50 and never having had a major depressive episode or manic episode prior. She sectioned me, and what was to have been a two day vacation in R.I. became ten, much to the detriment of my lawn, my cat, and my job. The biggest feeling I have in response is powerlessness. Oh, and the bill? $26,400.

Victim of diagnostic inflation. Grief is NOT an illness.

Hi Paul, I'm sorry to hear that you've been affected in this way. Could I interview you? I'm currently working on a project that, among other things, aims to bring the epidemiological inflation of mental illness diagnoses into the public spotlight. If you're open to a conversation, I'd love to talk with you, and we could communicate more directly via Facebook Messenger perhaps? My Facebook handle is jeremiahcoxfred. Feel free to DM me!

Victim of diagnostic inflation

ISEPP endorses this petition as just one step in the overall march away from a medical model classification system and toward the development of what the petition calls "an alternative approach to the conceptualization of emotional distress." Since there is no scientific evidence that the human problems described in the DSM are truly illnesses, there is no rationale for categorizing them as such. Further, ISEPP is greatly concerned about the DSM's increasing incorporation of common, everyday human problems into its domain. ISEPP encourages our allies to continue the campaign of eventually abandoning the medical model and addressing human distress and problematic behaviors in a humane, non-pathologizing way.

Starting back in the latter 80's there WAS this huge push via the California workers compensation system to incorporate psyche (mental) disorders by California legislators. Older women and backs working for companies like Kaiser with multiple physical were automatically sent to state licensed Workers Compensation doctors called QME, Qualified Medical-Legal psychologists or neuropsychiatrists that determine we all had certain mood disorders, personality disorders and often with many more than one. Most of these employees had never been to a psychiatrist or psychologist prior to getting hurt on the job. This too was part of a pattern with predatory management with specific actions on these employees. It was al done on purpose to get rid of these long term employees with the highest pay and in lieu work benefits. Its nt to say that we all suffered with depression and fight or flight anxiety but that we had not had those mental problems until after these women were targeted. The depression and anxiety comes directly from the actions that occurred to them while on the job and where these same women were over medicated with a multitude of medications like anti-depressants, tranquilizers, muscle relaxers, sleeping meds, pain meds and anti-psychotic meds. Then came the QME's who determined we were all suffering from the DSM disorders. Some up to 5 disorders. The reason for all of this to happen , was what was happening to us on the job by management and ultimately the realy physical injuries that we suffered and the mental disorders were a diagnosis to minimize our on the job injuries. Almost everyone of these women were in fact fired, told to file for SSA benefits and till this day, most of us live in abject poverty or dead at an early age. I know there are reasons to use the DSM disorders on other parts of the population like children but the corporate world had their sinister reasons to incorporate and maliciously label us mentally ill with all of these disorders to d

Signing as graduate LPC student

What has been done in the DSM 5 is disgusting and evil. Patients, most often women due to the still-existing stereotype that we are emotional and hysterical, continue to be gaslighted, abused, and denied treatment  because of what has been invented by a group of detached and dellusional psychiatrists who have no stakes in our whether or not we get better, or even survive. All it now takes for a physician to diagnose a women with "somatoform disorder" (aka, socially acceptable hysteria) is for a doctor to make an assumption that her pain is not physical but psychological. No medical evidence is needed, it is entirely based on subjective observations of any medical professional in power (and therefore, can't be disproven), and once a patient has been diagnosed with it from a single physician, that diagnosis serves as the only diagnostic criteria needed for other physicians to make the diagnosis. The DSM 5 is no longer a tool to treat mental health, but a tool to enforce systematic oppression of women and inconvenient patients that doctors don't want to deal with. It also serves as an easy out for doctors who are too lazy to actually do their work but still want to get paid and honored by society as "good people". Women and men die because of the DSM 5. Stop the nonsense. Change. Our lives matter. 

I am in agreement that revisions are needed in DSM 5.

I am a current undergraduate at Goucher College studying Psychology and Philosophy and full hearted support this open letter, stressing the importance of multiple psychological perspectives on mental distress and disorder in the DSM 5.

Estoy de acuerdo como psicólogo que tengamos acción en este ducumento que para nuestro ejercicio en el área clínica y de la salud se hace esencial. Sería bueno emitir nuestro concepto, impresión diagnóstica y observación experimental de los pacientes con afectaciones comportamentales.

I agree and fully support this petition.

I personally believe that before a patient is fit to be diagnosed with a potentially unproven disorder, they should be reviewed neurologically(brain scans), and theraputically to figure out the underlying issue before resorting to medication that could cause the patient unwanted side effects. As this petition says, it s important not to make the definition of mental disorders vague because the system's main goal should be patient's overall satisfaction rather than profit over selling medication or expensive procedures. As this petition also points out, socioeconomic factors can be more important than biological as well as healthy coping mechanisms due to chemical imbalances over medication.