Deconstructing DSM 5: de-classifying childhood

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual 5 (DSM-5) was released last month amidst a storm of criticism and controversy. Much of the focus of critique has been on the development and application of new categories of ‘mental illness’ for adults. However, the implications of changes in the DSM-5 for children and young people are far reaching. In particular, concerns have been expressed about the increasing emphasis on medico-physiological issues in understanding young people’s distress, as well as the introduction of new diagnostic categories for which the evidence base is quite variable. In this paper we focus on three changes in the DSM-5, considering the implications of these for our understanding of psychological distress, and for our understanding of childhood. The first is the changes in the diagnosis of ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’, and the way that violence is conceptualized in the new DSM. We the consider the introduction of ‘Gender Identity Disorder’, exploring how this construction functions to fix gender identity and sexuality as a fixed and rigid phenomenon, pathologising variations from reproductively defined and heteronormative readings of sexuality. Finally we consider the implications of the broadening of the understanding of ‘addiction’ to include non-biological phenomena like ‘internet addiction’ and consider the implications of this for our understanding of 21st century children’s lives. Our broad argument will focus on the way that the DSM handles (or fails to handle) social and cultural material in its conceptualization of ‘disorder’