DSM-5: the more it changes the more it is the same.

At the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association that took place in San Francisco in May 2013, after a year-long delay the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) was released. It is the result of the assiduous work of 400 clinicians who for about ten years endeavoured to articulate a new edition of the Manual. The last edition (DSM-IV-TR) appeared 13 years ago. Did anything substantially new occur in psychiatry in the meantime that could justify the creation of a new edition? No, it did not. Did the imperfections of the previous editions starting from the third one (DSM-III, 1980; DSM-III-R, 1987; DSM-IV, 1994; DSM-IV-TR, 2010) build up to a point where a new version that would correct them was badly needed? Indeed, the downsides of the preceding revisions of the Manual proved serious and numerous. Has DSM-5 managed to redress them?