The Intelligent Clinician's Guide to the DSM-5®

by Joel Paris MD

Overview

The Intelligent Clinician's Guide to the DSM-5® explores all revisions to the latest version of the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual, and shows clinicians how they can best apply the strong points and shortcomings of psychiatry's most contentious resource. Written by a celebrated professor of psychiatry, this reader-friendly book uses evidence-based critiques and new research to point out where DSM-5 is right, where it is wrong, and where the jury's still out. Along the way, The Intelligent Clinician's Guide to the DSM-5® sifts through the many public controversies and clinical debates surrounding the drafting of the manual and shows how they inform a modern understanding of psychiatric illness, diagnosis and treatment. This book is necessary reading for all mental health professionals as they grapple with the first major revision of the DSM to appear in over 30 years.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199970223
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	03/20/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Joel Paris, MD, was born in New York City, but has spent most of his life in Canada. He obtained an MD from McGill University in 1964, where he also trained in psychiatry. Dr. Paris has been a member of the McGill psychiatry department since 1972 and served as Department Chair from 1997 to 2007. He has published 178 peer-reviewed articles, 14 books and 40 book chapters. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry.

Table of Contents

Introduction Part I: Diagnostic Principles Chapter 1-The history of diagnosis in psychiatry Chapter 2-How diagnostic manuals are made Chapter 3-What is and is not a mental disorder Chapter 4-Diagnostic validity Chapter 5-Dimensionality Chapter 6--Clinical utility Part II: Specific Diagnoses Chapter 7-Schizophrenia spectrum and other psychoses Chapter 8-Bipolar and related disorders Chapter 9-Depressive disorders Chapter 10-Anxiety disorders, trauma, and the OCD spectrum Chapter 11-- Substance abuse, eating disorders, and sexual disorders Chapter 12-Neurodevelopmental and disruptive behavioral disorders Chapter 13-Personality disorders Chapter 14--Other diagnostic groups Part III--Overview Chapter 15-A guide for the perplexed

Editorial Reviews

Dr Paris has written a wise and well informed book that will help readers understand and avoid the problems created by DSM 5.

Allen J. Frances, MD, Professor Emeritus, Department of Psychiatry, Duke University School of Medicine, Durham, NC

Psychiatry's newest stage show (DSM-5) will draw a big audience, including health professionals, health organisations, lawyers and the general public. Joel Paris takes us 'back stage' . . . how can we appropriately classify and diagnose mental disorders, and the complexities of distinguishing a psychiatric 'case' from a 'non-case'. He details a flawed DSM-5 ideologically-based production but encourages us to recognise that while we have to use it, we can still work our way around it. He astutely observes that the DSM-5 editors know where Psychiatry is going and want to help us to get there more rapidly. . . . The book is a lucid, penetrating and perceptive 'must read' critique informing us the DSM-5 has no stronger a base in science than its immediate predecessors. We should all respect Paris' recommended antidote to its ideology - "apply extra caution and follow common sense".

Gordon Parker, Scientia Professor of Psychiatry, University of NSW, Sydney, Australia

The clinician who longs for a balanced, reliable, and illuminating assessment of the state of psychiatric diagnosis and what it all means for understanding our clients - and who yearns for a guide who understands all the technical details but has somehow miraculously retained his common sense - can do no better than to turn to Joel Paris's incisive, magisterial, tone-perfect, and clear-as-a-bell overview. . . . If I wanted to sit down with someone to talk over the background and meaning of psychiatric diagnosis as I will face it in the post-DSM-5 era, Joel Paris is the person I would talk to. This is the clinician's seatbelt for surviving the diagnostic turbulence that has been tossing us around over the past few years and, possibly, for years to come.

Jerome C. Wakefield, PhD, DSW, School of Social Work and Department of Psychiatry, New York University, New York and co-author of All We Have to Fear: Psychiatry's Transformation of Natural Anxieties into Mental Disorders

As referenced in The Globe and Mail, Toronto, April 27, 2013

From Sharon Jayson, USA Today, May 12, 2013:
"In his book, The Intelligent Clinician's Guide to the DSM-5, out last month, psychiatrist Joel Paris of McGill University in Montreal suggests that DSM has some pluses but a lot of minuses. 'The strong points would be that the manual does provide a useful guide to severe mental illness and it always has,' he says. The closer that it gets to what people would consider normal behavior, the less useful the DSM is, he says."

"This is an excellent critique of DSM-5 and psychiatry in general. Written in an engaging style, the book draws readers in. Although it is less than 200 pages, it covers the complex changes in DSM-5 thoroughly and objectively In particular, it focuses on the DSM-5's conflation of normality and psychopathology and the reductionist view of psychiatry solely as neuroscience. The author challenges the DSM-5's use of categorical and dimensional organization without clinical input. He details why senior experts from DSM-III and DSM-IV were left out of the planning process for DSM-5 and what the editors of the DSM-5 were trying to achieve. All of this serves readers well in understanding the purpose of DSM-5 and being able to make an informed opinion about it. I highly recommend this book for anyone who will be using the DSM-5."
— Brett C. Plyler, M.D., Doody's

"The clinician who longs for a balanced, reliable, and illuminating assessment of the state of psychiatric diagnosis and what it all means for understanding our clients - and who yearns for a guide who understands all the technical details but has somehow miraculously retained his common sense - can do no better than to turn to Joel Paris's incisive, magisterial, tone-perfect, and clear-as-a-bell overview." — News-Medical.net

"...a critical thinker's best-case scenario: a reader-friendly book that uses evidence-based critiques to point out where DSM-5 is right, where it is wrong, and where the jury is still out." — Leo Christie, President and CEO of Professional Development Resources

From the Publisher