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All mental health professionals diagnose their clients from the DSM, or the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. This manual is the Bible of psychiatry, covering the identity of patients with mental health issues, how mental health professionals treat their patients and how they approach their illness, the psychiatric drugs --- their development and how they are prescribed, and the many different insurance plans and which drugs they cover. But soon the DSM will be revised with new guidelines under the American Psychiatric Association, in the making over the past ten years and will be available in 2013.

Difference Between the DSM-4 and new DSM-5

When the new DSM-5 coming out for public comments until April 20, unlike the prior DSM-4,  it is said to not recognize the addiction of the Internet or sex addictions. However, a new category is created for individuals who are considered a risk disorder, heading toward dementia or a developing full psychosis.  They would be part of the new category --- temper dysregulation with dysphoria (TDD) – in order to incorporate behavioral disturbances and mood disturbances.

The TDD creation was developed as a major response to a huge over-diagnosis of the "juvenile bipolar disorder" over the past few years. Under the new DSM, it will capture two situations: the behavioral disturbance and also the mood upset instead of simply pediatric or juvenile bipolar disorder.

With little disagreement that such a situation actually does exist, the disagreement begins to occur between the symptoms of bipolar disorder in adults and in youth. It is now a very controversial area within the mental health field of children and youth which the new DSM has taken into stride with its new guidelines.

Changes in the new DSM-5

With new terms in the DSM-5, such as mental retardation being substituted for "intellectually challenged" or "Autism Spectrum Disorder" to be used for the encompassing areas of autism, Asperger's syndrome and other similar conditions, the new book is said to be moving mental disorders toward dimensional assessments.  

This involves strict immutable categories being replaced by cross-cutting symptoms and continuums that span several different disorders.  In the older DSMs, the severity of each disorder cannot be accounted for as in the new DSM-5. With this in mind, the older DSM cannot measure if a mentally ill patient is improving with treatments based on quantitative measures.