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

Psychiatric diagnoses have always been difficult and unreliable. This is one of the major reasons why illnesses seem to come and go. It was said that the best way to cure schizophrenics in America in the 1960s was to move them to England, where they would be considered merely ‘eccentric'. And it remains true that schizophrenia is still diagnosed less frequently in the UK than in the US. America has always dominated the psychiatric world.

Americans might not be too eager to accept that mental illness could be culturally determined, but in the UK we have tended to import their illness in much the same as we have embraced their taste in personal injury lawyers, sitcoms and diet. In the US, someone might be regarded as socially unskilled, unassertive and emotionally repressed; in Japan, the exact same behaviour might be considered simply demure or polite.

Psychiatrists have a tendency to colonise and pathologise behaviour patterns. New syndromes appear, the diagnostic manuals grow larger with each new edition. Naughty children now have attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder or adolescent defiant disorder. All sorts of behaviour previously thought of as selfish, immoral, even shameful, now gets nicely medicalised with a label that can be seen to excuse it. And soon there will be pharmaceutical companies with appropriate drugs to cure these new illnesses. Continue reading

Sources

• Aeon Magazine
• Image: You Tube