ABSTRACT
Despite this title, I reject the concept of mental disorder and its subsidiary concepts of anxiety disorders and obsessive-compulsive disorders without reservation. Far more important than DSM’s latest reorganization of its proposed mental disorders is that its basic concept of mental disorder has never changed. The very point of DSM-III in 1980 was to salvage the psychopathology concept of DSM-II by defining its proposed mental disorders more precisely. Although DSM-III introduced many changes in details and a few changes in disorder classes, it made essentially no change to the core DSM concept of mental disorder itself (Carson, 1991). That legacy has now been passed on intact in DSM-5, despite its creators’ intention, expressed often since DSM-IV-TR, to integrate into DSM-5 mental measurements based on graduated dimensions (Kupfer, First, & Regier, 2002; Regier, Narrow, Kuhl & Kupfer, 2009). That bold intention resulted in less than bold action: DSM-5 suggests optional dimensional measures but it continues to require DSM mental disorder diagnoses as before, and thus it did not integrate dimensions into disorders.
