Easy to check by looking at records how DSM was worked on. Evidence of how financial conflicts translated into diagnostic expansion: The Bereavement Exclusion

Easy to check by looking at records how DSM was worked on. Evidence of how financial conflicts translated into diagnostic expansion: The Bereavement Exclusion Smoking Gun 100% of the DSM-IV mood disorders work group had financial ties to pharmaceutical companies Mad In America . This same group eliminated the bereavement exclusion in DSM-5, allowing normal grief to be diagnosed as major depression after just two weeks. Kenneth Kendler, speaking for the group, explicitly argued “Either the grief exclusion criterion needs to be eliminated or extended so that no depression that arises in the setting of adversity would be diagnosable” Mad In America - essentially arguing that context should be irrelevant to psychiatric diagnosis. This change was “perhaps the most controversial change from DSM-IV to DSM-5” PubMed Central and critics argued it would “result in an increasing number of persons with normal grief to be inappropriately diagnosed with MDD after only two weeks of depressive symptoms” American Academy of Family Physicians and lead to unnecessary antidepressant prescribing. The ADHD Expansion: DSM-5 systematically lowered ADHD diagnostic thresholds: - Reduced symptom threshold from 6 to 5 symptoms for adults/adolescents over 17 PubMed Central Neurodivergent Insights - Increased age of onset requirement from 7 to 12 years old Neurodivergent Insights - Lowered impairment criteria - now only need to “reduce quality of functioning” rather than be “clinically significant” PubMed Central Critics specifically identified ADHD expansion as worsening the “false positive problem” by “expanding diagnosis to adults before addressing its reliability in children”