Psychiatrists' bible to get new conditions, names

(Anita Patterson Peppers)

If your child is often grumpy and throws fits, they could soon be diagnosed with TDD, or temper dysregulation with dysphoria to give it its full name.

If they have Asperger's syndrome, you might have to stop calling it that and switch to "mild autism spectrum disorder." And if getting a handle on math is their problem, they could have "dyscalcula."

Those are just some of the new names and mental disorders released Friday by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) that could be included in the next edition of mental health practitioners' tome of reference, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, usually called the DSM.

If all the proposed changes make it into the new DSM, which is due to be released in three years, "mental retardation" will become the more politically correct "intellectual disability," and conditions such as binge eating will be recognized as bona-fide mental disorders.

Pathological gamblers will get their very own category - behavioral addictions.

But if you're looking for a classification for kids of all ages who lock themselves in their rooms and spend hours on end on the Internet, you'll have to wait.

"Internet addiction" was considered for inclusion in the same behavioral addiction category as pathological gambling, but the work group decided there was insufficient research data to do so.

The APA has posted all the proposed changes to the DSM on the Internet to allow the public to review them and comment.

The new criteria for diagnosing a condition and new conditions will then be reviewed and refined over the next two years, and field trials will be conducted on some of the criteria to see if they work in a real-life scenario.

kdz/oh