In 1981, the American Psychiatric Association's Council on Research established a committee to evaluate DSM-III. Its chairman, Dr. Gary Tischler, sought recommendations from a number of national professional mental health organizations. In February, 1983, he wrote the American with a list of six questions about DSM-III, and an ad hoc committee was appointed to respond to them.
The committee consisted of Drs. K. Blacker (San Francisco), J. Egan (DC), A. Frances (NYC), D. Logue (Baltimore), J. Meyer (Milwaukee), W. Offenkrantz (Milwaukee), and A. Rosenblatt (San Diego). In addition to geographical diversity, they attempted to achieve balance among private practice, teaching, and research interests in psychoanalytic theory & practice, and among various age-group specialities and various theoretical emphases.
The committee was asked to respond to questions about the usefulness of DSM-III for diagnosis, treatment, forensic work, third party payment, education of mental health professionals, and describing subjects in research studies.
In brief, the committee responded as follows. It demonstrated the presence of concepts in DSM-III that refer to psychodynamically unconscious motives. It recommended a revision of the present multi-axial system to include levels and kinds of personality integration on Axis II (including such things as defense mechanisms, object relations, and level of development of personality systems). The committee went to some length to demonstrate the ways in which a number of these apparently highly abstract concepts can not only be made operational, but can be ranked on ordinal scales. The committee also made some trenchant observations and recommendations about DSM-III in relation to children.
The full report is available through the Central Office. A more detailed report of its findings and their significance will appear in a future issue of this Newsletter.