Is it time to awaken Sleeping Beauty? European psychiatry has been sleeping since 1980

Publication date: Available online 26 November 2014 Source:Revista de Psiquiatría y Salud Mental (English Edition) Author(s): Jose de Leon The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III), published in 1980, has led to a dead end, the DSM-V. Following the allegory of Sleeping Beauty, the DSM-III put European psychiatry to sleep; it now must wake up to create a 21st century psychiatric language for descriptive psychopathology and psychiatric nosology. Four topics are reviewed. First, the review of descriptive psychopathology focuses on: (a) Chaslin's and Jaspers’ books, and (b) Schneider's transmittal of Jaspers’ ideas and involvement with Kraepelin in incorporating neuroscience into psychiatric nosology. Second, US psychiatry's historic steps include: (a) the pseudoscience of psychoanalysis, (b) the low level of pre-DSM-III diagnostic expertise, (c) the neo-Kraepelinian revolution which led to DSM-III, (d) the failure to improve diagnostic skills, and (e) the reprise of Kraepelin's marketing (“neuroscience will save psychiatry”). Third, the DSM-III devastated European psychiatry by destroying: (a) the national textbooks which increased consistency but eliminated creative European thinking; and (b) the Arbeitsgemenschaft fur Methodic und Dokumentation in der Psychiatrie, the most reasonable attempt to reach diagnostic agreement: start with symptoms/signs (first level) rather than disorders (second level). Fourth, Berrios elaborated upon Jaspers...
Source: Revista de Psiquiatria y Salud Mental - Category: Psychiatry Source Type: research