American Psychiatric Association

Drs. Lieberman, Kupfer and Regier announce the launch of the DSM-5

As the release of the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5) looms, more than 13,000 psychiatrists descended upon San Francisco, Calif. For the APA, the first order of business was to launch the DSM-5 and answer the many questions about the revisions – and controversy – of this much-anticipated publication.

The American Psychiatric Association (APA) has proposed new criteria for a diagnosis of pathological gambling (PG) in the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, slated for publication in 2013.  As reported in Issues and Insights and discussed at the 2010 NCRG Conference on Gambling and Addiction, the proposed revisions included moving PG from the impulse control category into a new classification, “addiction and related disorders.” It also proposes dropping illegal acts from the 10 criteria and possibly reducing the number of criteria needed for a diagnosis from five to four. A new review article by Howard J. Shaffer and Ryan Martin in the 2011 Annual Review of Clinical Psychology (Shaffer & Martin, 2011) provides a critical review of these recommendations.