The revised fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM5) was approved on 1 December by the APA’s trustees and is due to be published in May 2013.

However, controversy continues over this new editon, with a former president of the American Psychological Association describing its expansion of categories and disorders as "the sickening of society".

Professor Frank Farley from Temple University, Philapdelphia, was writing on a blog for the Psychology Today website. There he laid out the history of concern over DSM-V in the United States:

In 2011 ... the Society for Humanistic Psychology (Division 32 of the American Psychological Association) entered the fray ...

The Society's leaders were especially concerned about certain new diagnostic categories where the lowering of diagnostic thresholds could result in hundreds of thousands of individuals, including young children and the elderly, being inappropriately diagnosed with a disorder and treated with powerful psychiatric drugs. The Society leadership was also concerned about the apparent primacy of biological models in the proposed DSM-V and the seeming lack of emphasis on psychosocial factors.

The American Psychological Association, Professor Farley explained, went on to organise a petition:

The petition started out modestly with a few hundred signatories, but exploded into a count of almost 14000 individual signatures, and more than 53 other professional organizations from around the world signing.

The British Psychological Society was among those signatories, and we also encouraged members to visit the American Psychological Association website and to consider signing the petition as individuals.

We expressed our own concerns in a statement issued in December 2011:

There is a widespread consensus amongst our members that some of the changes proposed for the new framework could lead to potentially stigmatising medical labels being inappropriately applied to normal experiences and also to the unnecessary use of potentially harmful interventions.