Volume_4_Issue_3_Digest

TPC D igest 41 Erika L. Schmit is a doctoral student at Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi. Richard S. Balkin, NCC, is an Associate Professor and Assistant Dean at Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi. Correspondence can be addressed to Erika L. Schmit, Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi, Counseling and Educational Psychology Department, College of Education, ECDC 232, 6300 Ocean Drive, Unit 5834, Corpus Christi, TX 78412-5834, erikalschmit@gmail.com. T he fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders ( DSM-5 ) includes a section titled “Emerging Measures and Models,” which contains “tools and techniques to enhance the clinical decision-making process, understand the cultural context of mental disorders, and recognize emerging diagnoses for further study.” At the forefront of this section, the American Psychiatric Association introduced cross-cutting symptom measures (CCSMs) that include two levels. Level 1 is concise, containing 1–4 items in each domain; whereas Level 2 is more comprehensive, offering a measure for each domain. Level 2 measures include such symptoms as depression, anger, mania, anxiety, somatic symptoms, sleep disturbance, repetitive thoughts and behaviors, substance abuse, inattention and irritability. Certain measures ask how often the individual has been bothered by the symptom within a time period of 7 days, and others ask the individual to choose a statement in a cluster that best represents the way he or she has felt within those 7 days. Common psychometric properties, such as the reporting of reliability estimates of the scores, were not readily Evaluating Emerging Measures in the DSM-5 for Counseling Practice – DIGEST Erika L. Schmit Richard S. Balkin