The Intelligent Clinician's Guide to the DSM-5® - Softcover

Psychiatry's newest stage show (DSM-5) will draw a big audience, including health professionals, health organisations, lawyers and the general public. Joel Paris takes us 'back stage' . . . how can we appropriately classify and diagnose mental disorders, and the complexities of distinguishing a psychiatric 'case' from a 'non-case'. He details a flawed DSM-5 ideologically-based production but encourages us to recognise that while we have to use it, we can still work our way around it. He astutely observes that the DSM-5 editors know where Psychiatry is going and want to help us to get there more rapidly. . . . The book is a lucid, penetrating and perceptive 'must read' critique informing us the DSM-5 has no stronger a base in science than its immediate predecessors. We should all respect Paris' recommended antidote to its ideology - "apply extra caution and follow common sense."
Gordon Parker, Scientia Professor of Psychiatry, University of NSW, Sydney, Australia

The clinician who longs for a balanced, reliable, and illuminating assessment of the state of psychiatric diagnosis and what it all means for understanding our clients - and who yearns for a guide who understands all the technical details but has somehow miraculously retained his common sense - can do no better than to turn to Joel Paris's incisive, magisterial, tone-perfect, and clear-as-a-bell overview. . . . If I wanted to sit down with someone to talk over the background and meaning of psychiatric diagnosis as I will face it in the post-DSM-5 era, Joel Paris is the person I would talk to. This is the clinician's seatbelt for surviving the diagnostic turbulence that has been tossing us around over the past few years and, possibly, for years to come.
Jerome C. Wakefield, PhD, DSW, School of Social Work and Department of Psychiatry, New York University, New York and co-author of All We Have to Fear: Psychiatry's Transformation of Natural Anxieties into Mental Disorders

As referenced in The Globe and Mail, Toronto, April 27, 2013

From Sharon Jayson, USA Today, May 12, 2013:
"In his book, The Intelligent Clinician's Guide to the DSM-5, out last month, psychiatrist Joel Paris of McGill University in Montreal suggests that DSM has some pluses but a lot of minuses. 'The strong points would be that the manual does provide a useful guide to severe mental illness and it always has, ' he says. The closer that it gets to what people would consider normal behavior, the less useful the DSM is, he says."

"This is an excellent critique of DSM-5 and psychiatry in general. Written in an engaging style, the book draws readers in. Although it is less than 200 pages, it covers the complex changes in DSM-5 thoroughly and objectively In particular, it focuses on the DSM-5's conflation of normality and psychopathology and the reductionist view of psychiatry solely as neuroscience. The author challenges the DSM-5's use of categorical and dimensional organization without clinical input. He details why senior experts from DSM-III and DSM-IV were left out of the planning process for DSM-5 and what the editors of the DSM-5 were trying to achieve. All of this serves readers well in understanding the purpose of DSM-5 and being able to make an informed opinion about it. I highly recommend this book for anyone who will be using the DSM-5."
-- Brett C. Plyler, M.D., Doody's

"The clinician who longs for a balanced, reliable, and illuminating assessment of the state of psychiatric diagnosis and what it all means for understanding our clients - and who yearns for a guide who understands all the technical details but has somehow miraculously retained his common sense - can do no better than to turn to Joel Paris's incisive, magisterial, tone-perfect, and clear-as-a-bell overview." -- News-Medical.net

..".a critical thinker's best-case scenario: a reader-friendly book that uses evidence-based critiques to point out where DSM-5 is right, where it is wrong, and where the jury is still out." -- Leo Christie, President and CEO of Professional Development Resources