Gabrielle Carlson, MD, Director of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Stony Brook University, and colleagues at The Hastings Center, commented on a proposal to include a new diagnostic category, dysregulation disorder with dysphoria (TDD), in the upcoming edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V).
The article is titled "Pediatric Mental Health Care Dysfunction Disorder?
" It was published in the May 20, 2010 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
The commentary is a plea to reform the approach to pediatric mental health care in the United States. Dr. Carlson and her colleagues comment that while the inclusion of the new diagnostic category may decrease the frequency of using the diagnosis of bipolar disorder for children with explosive behavior, it does not fix the real problems – the need to better understand the nature of severely troubled children’s disturbances and to intervene with safe and effective treatments, both pharmacological and non-pharmacological.
The authors point out that using a diagnosis like TDD, which better characterizes the children's behavior, does nothing, in itself, to “advance what everyone agrees should be the ultimate goal of psychiatric classification – helping troubled children to flourish.”
