Forget the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – we need a new system based on brain physiology, says psychiatrist Nick Craddock.

You don’t believe we should update the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) used to classify mental illness. Why not?

“There are many reasons we should pause. The DSM checklist of symptoms is not fit for purpose: its categories don’t map onto the emerging science of emotion and cognition, yet the DSM-5 rewriters plan to pull in more areas in the new categories and over-medicalise the situation further. Obviously the people rewriting DSM are not stupid, but the project is the wrong thing now. There are lots of great findings coming out of biology, neuroscience and psychology. We will need a new diagnostic system based on these…” (via New Scientist)