TPC-Journal-V4-Issue3

The Professional Counselor \Volume 4, Issue 3 185 they should have. Thus, while dimensionality may be an important innovation in the development of the DSM classification system, there are significant challenges ahead in calibrating these dimensions, refining the measures and considering social consequences. Clinical Implications Will dimensionality help or hinder the diagnostic process? On one level, the additional information about the condition may shift counselors’ fundamental way of thinking about treatment from “curing” clients (dichotomous) to helping them move toward more optimal points on the spectrum (dimensional). The availability of dimensional measures has the potential of improving diagnostic accuracy and providing a measure of treatment outcome (Segal & Coolidge, 2007). It may open the door to more measurement-based care, in which these ratings can be used to assess more precisely the need for care and the extent to which clients are profiting from treatment. This process may be more feasible to administer, score and record if these measures can be stored on tablets or mobile applications. In terms of using these dimensional measures, however, the unanswered question is—at what cost? Clinicians are already busy, and anything that encumbers that process even more will be resisted (Paris, 2013). Criteria sets are now a bit more complex to navigate because of the added severity rating and feature specifiers. It will take considerable time to learn and master the range of measures that have been posted online, much less research their psychometric appropriateness for the situations in which they will be used. The wild card is whether managed care will require these types of measures as a way of documenting need for treatment and response to provided services. At this point, clinicians would be best served to proceed cautiously, ensuring that the measures they use are reliable and valid for the client population intended. The New Organization of DSM-5 How was it decided in previous editions of the DSM which chapters to include and which disorders to place in each of them? While some research guided this process, tradition and clinical consensus were the primary sources that informed the organization of these earlier manuals (First & Tasman, 2004; Regier et al., 2013; Widiger, 2005). DSM-5 took a radically different approach, drawing upon research that examined how disorders actually cluster together. In this section, the new framework is examined and potential benefits and costs discussed. Innovation The DSM-5 manual is divided into three major sections. Section I provides an introduction, a discussion of key concepts such as the definition of a mental disorder, and guidelines for recording a diagnosis. Section II is the meat of the manual and contains all the mental disorders and other conditions that can be coded with their diagnostic criteria and background information. Section III includes tools for enhancing the diagnostic process, such as some of the dimensional measures discussed earlier, the WHODAS 2.0, and a Cultural Formulation Interview designed to assess the impact of culture on the clinical presentation. This section also includes a list of proposed mental disorders that require further study (e.g., Internet gaming disorder) and an alternative system for diagnosing personality disorders. Table 1 lists DSM-5 ’s major categories (chapters) of mental disorders. Two general principles determined the sequence of chapters and the placement of disorders within chapters. First, disorders were grouped into similar clusters based upon shared underlying vulnerabilities, risk factors, symptoms presentation, course and response to treatment (APA, 2013). Groups that are positioned next to each other share more commonalities than those placed further apart. For example, bipolar disorder follows schizophrenia spectrum because they share a number