It was 10 years ago on a dreary, damp, overcast Monday, around 1 p.m. in a windowless, bare, cinder block room just large enough for a king-size bed, a bedroom converted from a storeroom in a vending machine repair shop, in an aging industrial section of the west end of Tulsa, Okla., that our 26-year-old, beautiful, charming, loving, occasionally brilliant, multitalented, bipolar daughter found a hidden .22 caliber rifle, propped it up between the bedspring and the mattress, rested it on her chest, reached down, pulled the trigger, probably with her right thumb, and died instantly as the bullet ripped through her body, severing her aorta with what the medical examiner later described as a "perforating contact gunshot wound of the chest."

Our soul has been weeping ever since.

I miss her. Her mother and her twin brother miss her. We will always miss her. I want to always miss her. But I want to accept missing her. Someday I will. Her death still hurts, but it's getting better now.

At first, grief emotions attacked from everywhere. There was anger in my oatmeal, regret in the trees in my neighbor's backyard, depression drove my car to the grocery store, and frustration hijacked my dreams, my TV, treadmill and prayer. Continue reading

Sources

• Tom Smith in National Catholic Reporter
• Image: Karla Smith Foundation

Tom Smith is president of the Karla Smith Foundation, supporting families affected by mental illness and suicide across the United States.

Many conditions we're now familiar with were codified in the DSM, including body dismorphic disorder, schizophrenia and bipolar.

Inclusions and removals can be hugely controversial. Autism is in the manual, for example, but Asperger's isn't. Homosexuality was only removed in 1974.

Below, five experts explain some of the most noteworthy new additions, and why they've been included.

Hoarding disorder

David Mataix-Cols: Most children have collections at some point and approximately 30% of British adults define themselves as collectors. This is a pleasurable, highly social and benign activity, which contrasts with another disabling form of object accumulation: hoarding disorder.

The symptoms include persistent difficulty in discarding possessions due to a strong perceived need to save items and distress in discarding them. This results in the accumulation of a large number of possessions that fill up and clutter key living areas of the home, to the extent that their intended use is no longer possible.

Symptoms are often accompanied by excessive acquiring, buying or even stealing of items that are not needed or for which there is no available space.

Using DSM-5, hoarding disorder can only be diagnosed once other mental disorders have been ruled out.

With a prevalence of at least 1.5% of the UK population, the disorder is associated with substantial functional disability, family conflict, social isolation, risk of falls and fires, evictions and homelessness.

Binge eating disorder

Christopher Fairburn: The inclusion of binge eating disorder in DSM-5 was expected and uncontroversial for the deciding committee. It's already listed as a provisional diagnosis in DSM-IV.

The disorder is characterised by recurrent over-eating episodes and a sense of loss of control at the time. Sufferers don't have the extreme dieting, vomiting and laxative misuse seen in people who have bulimia. It is the loss of control over eating that is the distressing feature of binge eating disorder, or BED. Continue reading

Sources

• The Conversation
• Image: Sergei Yolkin's World, Voices from Russia
• See also: "Medicine's big new battleground: does mental illness really exist?" in The Guardian