Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders DSM-IV-TR Fourth Edition (Text Revision)

Since the DSM-IV was published in 1994, we’ve seen many advances in our knowledge of psychiatric illness. This Text Revision incorporates information culled from a comprehensive literature review of research about mental disorders published since DSM-IV was completed in 1994. Updated information is included about the associated features, culture, age, and gender features, prevalence, course, and familial pattern of mental disorders.

The DSM-IV brings this essential diagnostic tool up-to-date, to promote effective diagnosis, treatment, and quality of care. Now you can get all the essential diagnostic information you rely on from the DSM-IV along with important updates not found in the 1994 edition.

Stay current with important updates to the DSM-IV:

• Benefit from new research into Schizophrenia, Asperger’s Disorder, and other conditions

• Utilize additional information about the epidemiology and other facets of DSM conditions

• Update ICD-9-CM codes implemented since 1994 (including Conduct Disorder, Dementia, Somatoform Disorders)

DSM-IV-TR, the handheld version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Text Revision, is now available for both Palm OS and PocketPC handhelds. This Text Revision incorporates information culled from a comprehensive literature review of research about mental disorders and includes associated features, culture, age, and gender features, prevalence, course, and familial pattern of mental disorders. And with Skyscape's patented smARTlink™ technology, DSM-IV-TR can easily cross-index with other clinical and drug prescription products from Skyscape to provide a powerful and integrated source of clinical information that you can carry with you wherever you go!

I would recommend strongly (for both professionals, students, and the lay public), DSM-IV Made Easy by James Morrison. Morrison's book makes the DSM come alive. He illustrates technical points well, and provides interesting case examples that make you think of people when you read the diagnosis, not just symptoms.


Postpartum Disorders Reorganized   August 30, 2000
 74 out of 122 found this review helpful

I am pleased that postpartum psychosis has been dropped as a separate entry in the DSM IV TR. Postpartum is now correctly classified as a General Medical Condition. These changes call for the diagnostician to classify an afflicted mother by a disorder for which there is information more readily available, such as schizophrenia. In the case of a schizophrenic disorder, the mother is no more a danger to others (including the infant, I would infer) than those in the general population (p. 304). Therefore, mental health care providers have no basis to keep a mother separated from her infant any more than any normal parent. The manual is a useful tool for the afflicted to use for self-discovery, especially when there is mistrust, denial, anger, and agitation toward mental health care providers. The manual can literally put the afflicted and the provider "on the same page." It is well worth the investment in this book, a highlighter marker, and a therapy session to mark up and discuss the book.


Informative, but don't buy it if you have the original DSM-4   December 24, 2001
 73 out of 79 found this review helpful

The text-revised version is virtually identical to the 1994 version of the DSM-IV and not worth buying if you have the 1994 version. Along with the DSM-IV, the DSM-IV Text Revised version is, however, an informative book that provides good introductory information, especially in the "Diagnostic Features" section, about a wide variety of mental disorders. A problem of the manual, in my opinion, is its use of a categorical classification system while ignoring the dimensional nature of psychological phenomena.

Lee J. Markowitz, Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo (Ontario, Canada)


Not the simple, useful nosology you're looking for.   August 30, 2001
 61 out of 91 found this review helpful

I quote Karl Menninger, on the publication of the DSM-II in 1968:
"This year [1968] the APA took a great step backward when it abandoned the principles used in the simple useful nosology [DSM-I]. In the interest of uniformity, in the interest of having some kind of international code of designation for different kinds of human troubles, in the interest of statistics and computers, the American medical scientists were asked to repudiate some of the advances they had made in conceptualization and in the designation of mental illness."
Since then, it's gotten worse, not better, with thousands of symptom checklists and numbered diagnoses, conveniently correlated to the ICD-9 standard diagnosis codes for easier billing.
But people, medical students and physicians included, will insist on treating DSM-IV as a textbook in psychiatry. It's nothing of the sort - it never touches on the essential topics of etiology, prognosis, and treatment. People memorize the checklists and think they understand psychiatry, when in fact they have entirely failed to grasp the noble and great endeavor: riddling out the first causes and mechanisms of our humanity, and how those mechanisms go awry.
Well, then, you say, what about diagnosis? Isn't this a diagnostic manual?
In my opinion, for that purpose DSM-IV is worse than useless to a lay person. Consider the previous reviewer who thought the book made a good party game, diagnosing his healthy friends with all sorts of 'disorders'. It wouldn't take much experience in a psychiatric emergency room to realize that psychiatric illness is no party game - but it would take some. Without the context provided by direct, caring relationships with the mentally ill, the jargon and symptoms discussed in this book are meaningless. This book will not teach you to be a psychiatric diagnostician! Only experience can do that. It's intended as a quick reference guide for people with that experience, and a reference concerned with very practical matters not relevant to the patient-physician relationship (such as the standardized conduct and reporting of clinical trials, or how to justify billled services).
I'd disagree strongly with the prior reviewer who felt psychiatric patients should read their DSM-IV. If you're a psychiatric patient "on the same page" as your health care practictioner, get off the page and get on top of your life! You have more pressing concerns than making yourself into an expert psychiatric diagnostician and quibbling over the learned APA's compilation of symptom checklists - you need to heal.
In short, I can't imagine recommending this tome to anyone for any purpose - people who need it don't need me to tell them so.
...


DSM IV TR PAPERBACK   August 12, 2000
 60 out of 80 found this review helpful

The study of mental disorders is an ever evolving process. It is good to see a revision of the old DSM IV which has been in use for the past five years. The book is printed in a easy to read print size and the layout has been updated. There will be other revisions so this is the first of many, until DSM V.