Season 3 Ep 11: Redefining Psychiatric Constructs with Dr. Miri Forbes

Oct 1

Everyone who has a foot in the world of psychiatric diagnosis seems to agree that our diagnostic system could, at the very least, use some updating, if not burning it down and starting over.

So how do we approach developing constructs of psychiatric diagnoses that are more complex, more accurate, more flexible, and more context-specific than what we’ve been taught or what exists in the DSM-V?

Today, I’m excited to share my conversation with Dr. Miri Forbes, an expert in psychopathology and one of the authors of the paper, “Reconstructing Psychopathology: A Data-Driven Reorganization of the Symptoms in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.”

Dr. Forbes and her colleagues are doing innovative research on creating more empirically-supported diagnostic constructs.

This approach to symptoms, categorization, and how we think about and use diagnostic constructs is one that I hope will help us get out of the habit of taking our current diagnostic constructs too literally.

Dr. Forbes, an Associate Professor at Macquarie University's School of Psychological Sciences, is focused on improving our understanding of the empirical structure of psychopathology based on the specific patterns in which symptoms of mental disorders tend to co-occur.

She is an Associate Editor of The Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science,and serves on the Editorial Boards of Clinical Psychological Science and The Journal of Emotion and Psychopathology. Additionally, Dr. Forbes is a member of the Executive Board of the international Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) Consortium.

Listen to the full episode to hear:

How a dimensional model can potentially help decrease stigmatizing and pathologizing of individual human experiences

How the regrouping of symptoms creates potential for more fruitful research into how and why symptoms cluster and how best to treat them
Why reliance on current categorization and diagnostic criteria can cause clinicians to miss or lose vital information about clients
Reckoning with the utility of existing diagnoses like BPD that may lack statistical support

About Riva

Riva Stoudt is a therapist based in Portland, Oregon. When she's not working with patients, she likes to talk about all the things a therapist isn't "supposed" to talk about.