Psychology - Indianapolis

The most comprehensive, current, and critical resource for clinical practice available to today's mental health clinicians and researchers of all orientations. DSM-5 is used by health professionals, social workers, and forensic and legal specialists to diagnose and classify mental disorders, and is the product of more than 10 years of effort by hundreds of international experts in all aspects of mental health. The criteria are concise and explicit, intended to facilitate an objective assessment of symptom presentations in a variety of clinical settings- inpatient, outpatient, partial hospital, consultation-liaison, clinical, private practice, and primary care.

The Handbook helps clinicians and students learning the process of psychiatric diagnosis improve their skill in formulating a comprehensive differential diagnosis by providing a variety of approaches. These include a six-step diagnostic framework, 29 bottom-up “decision trees”, and 66 differential diagnosis tables for use once a tentative diagnosis has been made. It offers a solution to differential diagnosis that recognizes the complexity of human personality and the structural utility of the DSM-5™ classification

These cases exemplify the mental disorders categorized in the DSM-5™. Cases are cross-referenced with DSM-5™ and help with understanding diagnostic concepts, including symptoms, severity, comorbidities, age of onset and development, dimensionality across disorders, and gender and cultural implications. A brief discussion follows each case, analyzing the clinical presentation, highlighting key points, and exploring issues of comorbidity that may complicate both the diagnosis and subsequent treatment.