Introduction

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Top Highlights

• Sex refers to factors attributable to an individual’s reproductive organs and XX or XY chromosomal complement. Gender is a result of reproductive organs as well as an individual’s self-representation and includes the psychological, behavioral, and social consequences of the individual’s perceived gender.

• clinically significant disturbance in an individual’s cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior that reflects a dysfunction in the psychological, biological, or developmental processes underlying mental functioning.

• developmental and life span trajectories

• The organization of chapters of DSM-5 after the neurodevelopmental disorders is based on groups of internalizing disorders

• externalizing disorders

• neurocognitive disorders, and other disorders

• It is hoped that this organization will encourage further study of underlying pathophysiological processes that give rise to diagnostic comorbidity and symptom heterogeneity.

• begins with diagnoses thought to reflect developmental processes that manifest early in life

• followed by diagnoses that more commonly manifest in adolescence and young adulthood

• and ends with diagnoses relevant to adulthood and later life

• significant distress or disability in social, occupational, or other important activities

• An expectable or culturally approved response to a common stressor or loss, such as the death of a loved one, is not a mental disorder.

• Socially deviant behavior (e.g., political, religious, or sexual) and conflicts that are primarily between the individual and society are not mental disorders unless the deviance or conflict results from a dysfunction in the individual, as described above

• mental disorder should have clinical utility

• help clinicians to determine prognosis, treatment plans, and potential treatment outcomes for their patient

• Need for treatment is a complex clinical decision that takes into consideration symptom severity, symptom salience

• the individual’s distress

• associated with the symptom(s)

• disability related to the individual’s symptoms, risks and benefits of available treatments, and other factors

• The fact that some individuals do not show all symptoms indicative of a diagnosis should not be used to justify limiting their access to appropriate care.