Get Your Midnight Book Release Costume Ready!
The term “gender identity disorder”, for children and adults who strongly believe they were born the wrong gender, is being replaced with “gender dysphoria” to remove the stigma attached to the word “disorder”. Supporters equated the change with removing homosexuality as a mental illness in the diagnostic manual decades ago.
The revisions come in the first major rewrite in nearly 20 years of the diagnostic guide used by psychiatrists in the US and other countries. The changes were approved on Saturday.
The DSM-V will most notably eliminate Asperger’s syndrome in favor of a wider net for “autism spectrum disorder,” add hoarding and binge-eating disorders (binge-eating was there but kinda in the index before, or something), remove the bereavement exception for major depression, and probably about six thousand other things that make more sense if you have a background in the field.
Share opinions if you’ve got ’em, present and future shrinks! And tell us they’re going to jazz up that cover art.