I do not think this stuff has filtered through much to the clinical profession of Psychology. But its big amongst Psychology researchers. All have heard of the "replication crisis". Young academics are increasingly expected to display an understanding of the issues in job interviews, etc.
I thought this
letter by Dr Thomas Insel (former director of NIMH) to the APA was genius... He wrote it after the APA delivered the updated DSM (diagnostic manual for clinicians..) extremely late..
Speaking of research, the DSM is founded on research and exists in part for insurance companies to decide to pay or how much to pay... If the validity of research is being questioned, then the insurance cos. will no doubt jump at the chance to pay less..
"While many of these changes have been contentious, the final product involves mostly modest alterations of the previous edition, based on new insights emerging from research since 1990 when DSM-IV was published. Sometimes this research recommended new categories (e.g., mood dysregulation disorder) or that previous categories could be dropped (e.g., Asperger’s syndrome)."
...and I love me some shady Insel!
the bold style is mine, to mark my fave shade (eg putting "reliability" in quotes... as if they're delivering it a wink and saying, "you know, more or less"), and the parentheses/italics are what I imagine is his internal monologue to be..lol:
"The goal of this new manual, as with all previous editions, is to provide a common language for describing psychopathology. While DSM has been described as a “Bible” for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, (you could have just delivered it in post-its for all the effort you put into it) creating a set of labels and defining each. The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been “reliability” (you know DSM is the foundation for insurance claims and referrals?!? this chaos is going to be the death of me... )– each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity. (ditto last comment except more exasperated this time) Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, (we're a laughing stock in the medical community) not any objective laboratory measure. In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain or the quality of fever. Indeed, symptom-based diagnosis, once common in other areas of medicine, has been largely replaced in the past half century as we have understood that symptoms alone rarely indicate the best choice of treatment.(my med school roommate is a neurosurgeon now... how did I get mixed up with the wrong crowd?)"
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