As you may have heard, the American Psychiatric Association is in the midst of a revision to its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, used to identify different mental illnesses and assign diagnostic labels to patients.  This newest edition, the DSM-V, will be published some time in 2013.   Among the more controversial changes is the elimination of five of the 10 personality disorders currently listed, the best known of which is Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD).

This revision seeks to move diagnosis toward a greater emphasis on descriptive traits, based on the undeniable fact that individuals diagnosed with one personality disorder often demonstrate traits associated with another.  As many clinicians have pointed out, the personality disorders exist along a spectrum.  I suppose this refinement in the DSM is a step in the right direction as it appears to treat people a bit more like individuals than categories, but I have a more fundamental problem with the idea of assigning diagnostic labels in the first place.

The fundamental assumption behind the DSM is that its categories of mental illness, with their official code numbers, actually correspond to a discrete syndrome exhibited by real people; in this sense, it is meant to be the psychological counterpart of the International Classification of Diseases 9 (ICD-9) used by physicians to diagnose and label physical illness.  In theory, applying the DSM-IV label Narcissistic Personality Disorder should carry the same weight and have as much scientific validity as an ICD-9 code for, say, diabetes.  The impending elimination of NPD from the DSM-V proves that such an analogy is fallacious.   Can you imagine if the American Medical Association suddenly announced it intended to eliminate diabetes from the ICD-9?
Continue "The Fallacies of Psychological Diagnosis"