On the DSM-IV Criterias

In Medicine, a lot of things are diagnosed based on certain criteria; Duke's used in diagnosing infective endocarditis, ARA's used in diagnosing SLE and what nots. The same applies in Psychiatry, just that in psychiatry, there's some sort like a big main manual in diagnosing all the psychiatric illnesses, we call it the DSM-IV Criteria: Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of the 4th edition.

But to follow strictly the manual is basically... Well, as one of the professor put it, illogical.

Let's just say, a guy who hear voices for the past 2 weeks asking him to kill his mother because his mother will kill him if he doesn't kill her first, and after that he should hang himself because he need to make sure he would not be jailed for homicide. It's illogical that we wait for 6 months, as mentioned in the manual, before we diagnose him to have Schizophrenia. After 6 months, God knows what could have happened.

Apparently, in our hospital, the DSM-IV is used. There's another manual called the ICD-10 (International Classification of Disease 10th edition). I heard it's even more complicated in the sense that, different disease comes under a certain code. Like, uh... Okay...

So really, most of the time, we spent in memorizing the criteria in the manual, at least for the common psychiatric illnesses that were.

One of the professors jokingly put it, undergraduate like us, we have to. But when we have enough experience in the future, then probably we wouldn't need to adhere tightly to the manual.

DSM after all, is a "Damn stupid manual", he said.

Couldn't agree more. LOL.