Gemma Spake

That naturally meant that suddenly a lot more people

qualified.

They also lowered the symptom threshold, the amount of basically symptoms that needed to be present.

Especially for older adolescents and adults, they lowered it from six to five.

So suddenly people who had five and not six were now included as well.

And the reason they did that was because they were like, it just seems kind of arbitrary that you could have over half of

The symptoms and still not be diagnosed, but having one more than over half would give you a diagnosis.

Those changes made it easier for adults, especially people whose symptoms were never recognized in childhood, to meet diagnostic criteria later on that previously would have excluded them, despite what they were dealing with.

Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that they became more lenient.

You might think that.

You might say, well, look, this is becoming easier.

No, no, no.

Like there were many, many clinical trials, many, many clinical trials, many, many discussions that was like this change was debated for years before it took place.

And it just better matches what experts and clinicians now believe has been true about ADHD all along.

PTSD is another interesting case, aside from what we've already mentioned, because its most recent classification shows that diagnostic broadening does occur, but diagnostic narrowing can also happen all at once.

So the DSM-5 actually revised PTSD pretty substantially.

It moved PTSD into an entirely new chapter of the manual.

Previously, it was an anxiety disorder.

They now know that's probably not the case.

It's definitely not the case.