For more than 11 years, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) has been laboring to revise the current version of its best-selling guidebook, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) (see " Psychiatry's Bible Gets an Overhaul” in Scientific American MIND). Although the DSM is often called the bible of psychiatry, it is not sacred scripture to all clinicians—many regard it more as a helpful corollary to their own expertise. Still, insurance companies in the U.S. often require an official DSM diagnosis before they help cover the costs of medication or therapy, and researchers find it easier to get funding if they are studying a disorder officially recognized by the manual. This past December the APA announced that it has completed the lengthy revision process and will publish the new edition—the DSM-5—in May 2013, after some last (presumably minor) rounds of editing and proofreading.
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