Overdiagnosis in Psychiatry

As one of the few books to thoroughly examine the critical problem of over-diagnosis in psychiatry today, Dr. Joel Paris - author of The Intelligent Clinician's Guide to the DSM-5 - shows how over-diagnosis leads to over-treatment in Overdiagnosis in Psychiatry: How Modern Psychiatry Lost Its Way While Creating a Diagnosis for Almost All of Life's Misfortune. Leaving no stone unturned, Dr. Paris considers the complications of the DSM-5 system with particular reference to major depression, bipolar disorder, PTSD and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. While each of these conditions have given rise to diagnostic fads and epidemics, the classification of mental disorders remains provisional without any biomarkers for mental disorders. Because of this, Dr. Paris makes the case for the importance of conservative diagnoses, recognizing that normal variants are not necessarily disorders.