Demonstrating that the folks who are revising the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) are listening to the scientific data, they have nixed two new proposed diagnoses — anxiety-depressive syndrome and attenuated psychosis syndrome. The changes were announced this week at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, the organization largely responsible for updating the reference manual used by health and mental health professionals to make diagnoses.

The critics were worried that these new diagnoses would label millions of Americans with a mental disorder — and offering them subsequent treatment — that today wouldn’t qualify for such diagnosis or treatment.

For instance, while anxiety mixed with depression is actually quite commonly seen in the wild of clinical practices, there is no specific diagnosis for this mixed mood state. The DSM-5 sought to correct this problem — that clinicians are treating millions for a problem the DSM says doesn’t technically exist. But critics worried the new criteria were too lax and might result in over-diagnosis.

The same was true for attenuated psychosis syndrome. The proposed diagnosis was an effort to get children and young adults into treatment sooner for experiencing weird thoughts or hallucinations. But people worried that it would lead to unnecessary treatment of kids for a potentially temporary problem.

The other week, my 5-year-old daughter broke her arm at the elbow. It was a serious break which required a call to 911, an ambulance ride, surgery, and an overnight stay at the hospital.

As her mom, I felt helpless. I couldn’t make her pain go away. I couldn’t fix her broken arm. So I simply put my head next to hers, and told her that I was here, and I wouldn’t leave her. That was the mantra I repeated over and over. And it was enough.

We humans break easily.

And I’m not talking simply about bones. Our feelings get hurt. Our self-esteem is fragile. We hurt each other with words and actions. We bully each other, steal from one another, gossip, verbally abuse, and assault those around us. We hurt ourselves by what we do. We cut or burn ourselves, neglect our health, abuse food and drugs, and engage in reckless behavior.

Others abuse us and neglect us. People who should love us hurt us. Sometimes simply getting through one day to the next takes an incredible amount of courage and strength.

This past Easter Sunday I was heading back from the grocery store, enjoying a song on the radio and looking forward to the day. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a dog and a cat bolted into the street in front of me, the dog chasing the cat. I ended up hitting and killing the cat.

At first I wasn’t sure if I had hit both animals… I stopped the car in the middle of the street, got out and realized the cat was not going to survive.

It was devastating. I am fortunate because the dog’s owner came running out after the dog and acknowledged this was all his fault, although it sounds like it was all just an accident and no negligence on his or my behalf.

Children, like all of us, continually experience loss. As much as they may celebrate their increased capacity to ‘do stuff’ like riding a bicycle or attending school, they also feel the loss of the special attention and privileges they had when they were younger and more dependent.

They feel loss when their family moves, when people in the family leave home, when pets die, when the boy or girl they like doesn’t like them, or when their best friend finds a new No. 1. They feel loss when holiday traditions change or vacations are suspended due to financial strain on the family. They feel loss when Grandpa can’t pick them up and twirl them around anymore, and when Grandpa dies.

Learning to grieve for losses great and small is a critical skill in a child’s healthy development. Children who do not learn to grieve are unequipped for life, as life and loss are indivisible.

Like adults, kids also get stressed out. They stress over school, bullies and fights with friends. They worry when their parents argue. They experience loneliness and have fears about many things from failing an important test to not fitting in.

In her book The Power of Your Child’s Imagination: How to Transform Stress and Anxiety into Joy and Success, child educational psychologist and UCLA professor Charlotte Reznick, Ph.D, shares nine tools that help kids access their inner world so they can better traverse the trials and tribulations of growing up.

Here’s a brief look at Reznick’s valuable tools.

It was an unseasonably warm spring afternoon, almost 80 degrees. As a new family therapist …

Diana Denholm can relate to the challenges of being a caregiver. A month after her husband proposed, he was diagnosed with colon cancer.

While he survived the cancer, he was later diagnosed with congestive heart failure. Even after receiving a heart transplant, her husband continued to deteriorate and develop other conditions, including severe osteoarthritis, skin cancer, kidney failure, depression and Parkinson’s disease. Denholm was her husband’s primary caregiver for over a decade.

Even though Denholm, Ph.D, LMHC, is a medical psychotherapist, she felt incredibly unprepared for her role and found little direction for navigating the many stresses and challenges of being a caregiver.

This inspired her to write the book The Caregiving Wife’s Handbook: Caring for Your Seriously Ill Husband, Caring for Yourself, which gives women the practical tools to traverse their day-to-day lives and communicate with their husbands.

“Have the psychiatrists gone mad? — those who weren’t crazy to begin with! They want to turn grief into a disease!”

This might well be the attitude of many in the general public, having read the misleading news coverage of a debate over the DSM-5 — the still-preliminary diagnostic classification of mental disorders, often referred to as “psychiatry’s Bible.” Now, I am no fan of the DSM model of diagnosis — in fact, if the DSM is the “bible,” I’m something of a heretic. In my view, the DSM’s superficial symptom checklists are great for research purposes, but not very useful for most clinicians or patients.

Nevertheless, I don’t like seeing the work of my DSM-5 colleagues misrepresented. So when I see bogus headlines like, “Grief Could Join List of Disorders” in the usually circumspect New York Times, I cringe.

Before discussing the arcane debate over the “bereavement exclusion,” it’s important to understand what most psychiatrists really believe about grief, bereavement, and depression.

Valentine’s Day reminds us to celebrate love.

But no matter how much chocolate we eat, how bright our flowers, how much we say that it’s a silly holiday, or how happy or unhappy we are about the state of our relationships, this love celebration often comes with some serious pangs of loneliness.

While we might fantasize that love is a cure for loneliness, and imagine that someday we’ll stop feeling lonely, or that other people don’t feel lonely, the reality is that love and loneliness go hand in hand; when we open our hearts to feel love, we also open our hearts to feel loneliness.

Loneliness does not mean that we are doing something wrong or that there is something wrong with us. Loneliness is not a contagious disease that we can ward off by never being alone or manically pursuing relationships. Loneliness is not a sin. Loneliness does not mean we are ungrateful.

Loneliness is not reserved for single people, depressed people and introverts. Loneliness is a part of every human’s experience, whether we are looking for a partner, married, the life of the party, or a certifiable hermit.

It’s been heating up now for the past few weeks as a charge led mainly by professionals. And it has caught the eye of the mainstream media. I’m talking about the revision process for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-5 (DSM-5), the reference manual mental health professionals and researchers use to treat patients and design reliable research studies examining mental illness.

The latest upset? The fact that the new DSM-5 suggests that depression could co-occur with grief. Critics see the changes as suggesting the DSM is trying to “medicalize” normal grieving. Anyone who experiences grief after a tragic or significant loss will now be at risk for receiving — heaven forbid — mental health treatment and a diagnosis.

We’ve covered this ground here on more than one occasion, but it appears time to talk about whether depression can occur at the same time as grief or not. My first reaction was — grief is grief, depression is depression, and the two never really co-occur. But a few years ago, I read a piece here on World of Psychology by Dr. Ron Pies which completely changed my perspective.

“Guilt is a part of the battlefield that often goes unrecognized,” writes Nancy Sherman, a professor at Georgetown University, in her book The Untold War: Inside the Hearts, Minds and Souls of Our Soldiers. But along with profound guilt comes a variety of emotions and moral issues that tug at soldiers, creating an inner war.

Sherman, who also served as the Inaugural Distinguished Chair in Ethics at the Naval Academy, delves into the emotional toll war takes on soldiers. Her book is based on her interviews with 40 soldiers. Most of the soldiers fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, while some fought in Vietnam and the World Wars.

She poignantly looks at their stories from the lens of philosophy and psychoanalysis, using these frameworks to better understand and analyze their words.

About 30 to 40 percent of people will experience significant distress after learning that they have cancer, according to James C. Coyne, Ph.D, director of the Behavioral Oncology Program at the Abramson Cancer Center and professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. But it tends to resolve after three or four months, he said.

Clinical depression, however, affects about 16 percent of cancer patients, according to a 2011 study published in The Lancet Oncology. Researchers analyzed 94 studies with more than 14,000 patients. Depression was especially common — with 30 to 40 percent of patients affected — when other mood disorders were present.

Depression also appears to affect people with certain cancers to a greater degree, such as oropharyngeal (22–57 percent), pancreatic (33–50 percent), breast (2–46 percent) and lung cancers (11–44 percent), according to Derek Hopko, Ph.D, associate professor at The University of Tennessee and co-author of A Cancer Patient’s Guide to Overcoming Depression and Anxiety: Getting Through Treatment and Getting Back to Your Life.