636,120 Ways to Have Posttraumatic Stress Disorder

Hat tip to "Big Trends in Neuroscience" where I first came across the link. This made the rounds about a year ago while I was on hiatus, but it still deserves extra attention

Diagnosing mental illness: more than half a million reasons to worry

Here’s a fascinating article from Perspective on Psychological Science about the very troubling state of psychiatric diagnosis, using PTSD as the prime example (Galatzer-Levy and Bryant 2013). I know DSM bashing is all the rage (looking at you, Tom Insell), but this paper takes DSM to the woodshed in some new and exhilarating ways. I had my behavioral neuroscience students read it last semester, and it got them appropriately agitated.

Bibliography

Galatzer-Levy, I. R., and R. A. Bryant. 2013. 636,120 Ways to Have Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. Perspectives on Psychological Science. SAGE Publications, November 1. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1745691613504115

You can find the full paper in PDF format here