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Articles on DSM

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Winona Ryder played Susannah Kaysen in the film of Kaysen’s memoir, Girl, Interrupted. Columbia Pictures/IMDB

Girl, Interrupted interrogates how women are ‘mad’ when they refuse to conform – 30 years on, this memoir is still important

Why was Susanna Kaysen really hospitalised? Her memoir Girl, Interrupted turns 30 this year. It investigates whether she was ‘mad’, or medicalised for a ‘chaotic’ life that defied gender norms.
The frequency and intensity of repetitive behaviours vary between mild and severe, which is why it’s called a spectrum. Dubova/Shutterstock

It’s 25 years since we redefined autism – here’s what we’ve learnt

It’s been 25 years since autism was redefined and the surge in diagnoses and research began. But while we’ve come along way in our understanding of the spectrum, advances in drug therapies has lagged.
Some soldiers’ wounds in WWI were more mental than physical. George Metcalf Archival Collection

From shell-shock to PTSD, a century of invisible war trauma

Mental health trauma has always been a part of war. Treatments have come a long way over the last century, but we still don’t understand why the responses change for different people and times.
This is your brain on plugs. 'Brain' via www.shutterstock.com

What’s behind phantom cellphone buzzes?

Have you ever checked your phone thinking you had felt it vibrate or heard it ring, only to see that no one tried to reach you? One researcher decided to study this phenomenon.
When many doctors went through training they would not have learnt adults could suffer from separation anxiety. from www.shutterstock.com.au

Separation anxiety disorder: not just for kids

Adult separation anxiety is a relatively new concept. There are, as yet, no published evidence-based treatments for the condition.
School refusal needs to be recognised as a psychological problem, rather than being glossed over in school attendance policies. from www.shutterstock.com.au

School refusal is not the same as wagging

School refusal is a serious difficulty for many students, but it is often ignored in policies for increasing school attendance.
People who worry excessively about catastrophic consequences of seemingly benign symptoms are known as hypochondriacs. Karrie Nodalo/Flickr

Listen up hypochondriacs, how do you want to be remembered?

We all worry about our health from time to time, at least to some degree, but some people worry excessively about catastrophic consequences of seemingly benign symptoms. They’re known as hypochondriacs…
People are becoming more likely to believe that high-tech visualising techniques might allow us to see psychopathy in the actual physiology of the brain. JE Theriot/Flickr (resized)

Looking for psychopaths in all the wrong places: fMRI in court

In the latest instalment of our series Biology and Blame Micol Seigel poses some important questions about the assumptions behind the legal use of fMRI. Of the current uses of psychiatry in legal settings…
Sluggish cognitive tempo is used to describe kids whose attentional deficits are due to low levels of mental energy. Alec Couros/Flickr

Is ‘sluggish cognitive tempo’ a valid new childhood disorder?

Sociology influences medicine more than we like to admit. One only needs to look at the history of psychiatric disorders – a term used broadly here to incorporate developmental disorders – to see how “normal…
Clinical depression is distinguished severity, duration, persistence, and recurrence. darcyadelaide/flickr

Feeling down: when does a mood become a disorder?

We’ve all felt sad, anxious or down at one time or another, but where does the normal experience of emotion end and the clinical picture of a mood or anxiety disorder begin? Psychiatry has two widely used…

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