The Professional Counselor | Volume 12, Issue 1 39 DMDD. Yet, in real practice, the diagnostic process is often plagued by careless errors and clinician biases (Garb, 1998; Lacasse, 2014). Consequently, the issue becomes how well clinicians can apply these criteria in often complex clinical situations. More research is needed on how well counselors and other clinicians can reliably diagnose DMDD and differentiate it from other conditions in ordinary practice settings. Concerns about the diagnostic validity of DMDD have been most pronounced in the differentiation of DMDD from ODD. In the DSM-5 (APA, 2013), a diagnosis of DMDD automatically supersedes a diagnosis of ODD; thus, these two diagnoses cannot be given concurrently. However, when researchers have removed this exclusionary rule, they have found that nearly all the children and adolescents who met the diagnostic criteria for DMDD also met the diagnostic criteria for ODD (Axelson et al., 2012; Freeman et al., 2016; Mayes et al., 2016). As just one example, Mayes, Waxmonsky, et al. (2015) reported that 91% of the children who met the criteria for DMDD in their study also qualified for a diagnosis of ODD. However, the reverse is not true. Researchers have found that diagnoses of ODD commonly occur in the absence of DMDD. Approximately one-third of children and adolescents who meet diagnostic criteria for ODD do not have significant symptoms of DMDD (Mayes et al., 2016). According to the hierarchy or parsimony principle in the DSM-5 (APA, 2013), a clinician should diagnose the most severe disorder that best captures the multitude of symptoms that a client is experiencing instead of adding on several more minor diagnoses to the diagnostic record. For example, children and adolescents who meet the diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorder simultaneously meet the diagnostic criteria for social communication disorder. Therefore, an additional diagnosis of social communication disorder is unnecessary. Likewise, in the DSM-5, a diagnosis of DMDD is higher on the diagnostic hierarchy than ODD, and thus many of the symptoms of ODD are subsumed under a diagnosis of DMDD. For clinicians who carefully follow the diagnostic rules of the DSM-5, both negative affectivity and oppositional behavior can be recognized and targeted as part of a treatment plan for a youth with DMDD. For an alternative point of view, some researchers have expressed the concern that a single, overruling diagnosis of DMDD will fail to adequately acknowledge the behavioral problems associated with ODD, resulting in suboptimal treatment planning decisions (S. C. Evans et al., 2017; Mayes et al., 2016). Mayes et al. (2016) pointed out that a diagnosis of DMDD fails to acknowledge many of the disruptive behavioral components of ODD that are nearly always present in children and adolescents who meet the diagnostic criteria for DMDD. Likewise, S. C. Evans et al. (2017) argued that treating DMDD as a Depressive Disorder—and withholding a diagnosis of ODD, per DSM-5 hierarchical rules—may lead clinicians to conceptualize these youth as having a mood disorder rather than a behavior disorder. For primary care providers and pediatricians, treating DMDD as a mood disorder and removing the ODD label may both decrease referrals for behavioral interventions that are well established (e.g., parent management training) and increase the administration of psychotropic medications such as antidepressants, antipsychotics, and mood stabilizers, for which evidence is limited. (p. 39) However, the concerns just mentioned may reveal more about problems in the correct use and application of the DSM-5 by clinicians rather than problems inherent in diagnostic rules prescribed by the DSM-5.
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