Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (affectionately and snappily known as DSM), currently (as of 2017) in its fifth edition, is a manual of psychiatric diagnosis. The Board of Trustees of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) makes decisions, subject to ratification or rejection by the general APA membership, on what disorders to include in it. The first edition, published in 1952, described eleven categories of mental disorders and listed 106 individual disorders. DSM-III (1980) included 265 disorders and DSM-IV (1994) and DSM-5 (2013) listed nearly 300.

The first and second editions listed homosexuality as a disorder, but DSM-II 6th Printing (1973) substituted "sexual orientation disturbance", which was in turn removed completely from the DSM-III-R in 1987. Narcissistic personality disorder was removed in 1968 and re-inserted in 1980. DSM-III (1980) jettisoned the terms "neurosis", "melancholia", and "manic depressive illness" and replaced them with "anxiety", "major depression", and "bipolar disorder" (respectively). Multiple personality disorder was included in DSM-III and renamed "dissociative personality disorder" in the DSM-IV.

DSM-5 (not "DSM-V"), published in 2013, finally removed the term "mental retardation" and replaced it with "intellectual disability". The DSM-5 sexual disorders work group abandoned its efforts to add hypersexuality (sex addiction), coercive paraphilia (rape) and hebephilia (statutory rape) as diagnosable disorders when it became evident that there was massive disapproval from the broader APA membership and the rest of society. One concern was that these new diagnoses would over-medicalize human behavior.

Conflict of Interest among panel members
According a study publish in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS Medicine; it was revealed that among all panels there was a staggering 69% incidence of conflicts of interest with the pharmaceutical industry. That is 67% on the panel for mood disorders, 83% for psychotic disorders, and 100% among sleep wake disorders. The speculation that one could engage in here is how many of the new diagnostic criteria come into existence solely for the purpose of allowing companies to create new medications, effectively allowing pharmaceutical companies to create their own market and demand.