Springfield, VA, USA. The American Psychiatric Association (APA) has named the Work Groups and membership for its coming fifth revision to the Manual for Diagnosis of Mental Disorders (DSM-V). The DSM is a guide to what the APA terms mental disorders. It is the handbook desktop reference used most often for diagnostics in the United States and internationally.

The manual contains a listing of psychiatric disorders, diagnostic codes, information on the prevalence of each disorder, and diagnostic criteria. The APA advertises the DSM as a non-theoretical guide that does not offer information on causes or treatments.

The DSM is a publication known as the bible of psychiatry. It is consulted on a regular basis by insurance companies, courts, prisons and schools, as well as by physicians and mental health workers.

Mental health professionals use the DSM for a variety of purposes, such as clinical practice, research, and educational purposes. Clinicians also use the DMS-IV to classify patients for billing purposes. The government and many insurance carriers require a specific diagnosis in order to approve payment for treatment.

The DSM has gone though five major revisions since first publication, with the most recent major update published in 1994. 

The current version is a minor variant published in July 2000 that adds clarifying text (DSM-IV, Text Revision). The primary goal was to maintain the currency of the DSM-IV text with the empirical literature up to 1992.

The DSM has its share of critics.

According to Christopher Lane, a scholar at Northwestern University, the DSM has a history of medicalizing what for many people, appear to be common behavioral attributes. Lane chronicled what he calls the "highly unscientific and often arbitrary way" in which widespread revisions were made to the DSM in his book, Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness.

Lane notes that by 1987 the DSM removed the key phrase "a compelling desire to avoid," requiring instead only "marked distress". Lane argues that could include concern about saying the wrong thing. "Impairment became something largely in the eye of the beholder, and anticipated embarrassment was enough to meet the diagnostic threshold."

Since the last major edition (DSM-IV), most of the changes have been in the descriptive text, with some error correction and changed diagnostic codes to reflect updates to the ICD-9-CM coding system adopted by the U.S. Government. It is available from the the DSM-IV-TR web site.

Completion of the DSM-V revisions is planned for 2011/12.

The Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV (SCID) Axis I Disorders (SCID-I) is a semi-structured interview for making the major DSM-IV Axis I diagnoses. The SCID-II is a semi-structured interview for making DSM-IV Axis II: Personality Disorder diagnoses. The official SCID site maintains a list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs).