The DSM-5 was officially released today. We will be covering it in the weeks to come here on the blog and over at Psych Central Professional in a series of upcoming articles detailing the major changes.

In the meantime, here is an overview of the big changes. We sat in on a conference call that the American Psychiatric Association (APA) had in order to introduce the new version of the diagnostic reference manual used primarily by clinicians in the U.S. to diagnose mental disorders. It is called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and is now in its fifth major revision (DSM-5).

James Scully, Jr., MD, CEO of the APA, kicked off the call by remarking that the DSM-5 will be a “critical guidebook for clinicians” — a theme echoed by the other speakers on the call.

We’re joining the APA in honoring Mental Health Month, which seeks to bring awareness to the importance of taking care of your physical, mental and emotional health and well-being.

Nowadays there seems to be a focus when talking about mental illness or challenging life issues to talk about what’s wrong. There’s this emphasis on symptoms — an emphasis that seems unrelenting and single-minded.

Eventually, when you get into psychotherapy, you do start talking more about your strengths, about the good things in your life, and how you extend such strengths and wins into other aspects of your life. But people don’t seem to go into psychotherapy as much nowadays. They expect life changes to just happen, with little effort on their part.

Since this is Mental Health Month, it seems like a good time to just say what sometimes seems impossible — you can make the change you want in your life.

Today, we’re joining the APA in honoring Mental Health Month. One of the aims of Mental Health Month is to bring awareness to the importance of taking care of your physical, mental and emotional health and well-being.

Stress touches everyone. It’s a tangible part of our days. But it doesn’t have to dismantle our lives. The key is to cope with stress effectively. And, thankfully, this is something each of us can learn. Once you find practices that resonate with you, you can tuck them into your personal wellness toolbox for use at any time.

Below, Kathryn Tristan, author of the book Why Worry? Stop Coping and Start Living, shared her tips for alleviating stress and enhancing your well-being. You’ll also find a simple test at the bottom to help you quickly assess your stress level.

It is Mental Health Awareness month, and I began to contemplate what mental health means to me.

Mental health and wellness is the state at which one feels, thinks, and behaves. Mental health can be viewed on a continuum, starting with an individual who is mentally well and free of any impairment in his or her daily life, while someone else might have mild concerns and distress, and another might have a severe mental illness.

Everyone has “stuff” that they keep contained in a tightly sealed plastic bag. There are some who occasionally can’t help but let the “stuff” leak, and there are those with the bag wide open.

However, in our society, we still tend to stigmatize those who let their “stuff” leak out instead of helping them, understanding them, or simply not judging them. Just as we all know someone with cancer, we all know someone with a mental health disorder.

In the past week, I’ve seen some incredibly sensationalistic articles published about the upcoming DSM-5 and a letter recently released by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). In the letter by Dr. Thomas Insel, director of the NIMH, wrote in part, “That is why NIMH will be re-orienting its research away from DSM categories.”

Some writers read a lot more into that statement than was actually there. Science 2.0 — a website that claims it houses “The world’s best scientists, the Internet’s smartest readers” — had this headline, “NIMH Delivers A Kill Shot To DSM-5.” Psychology Today made the claim, “The NIMH Withdraws Support for DSM-5.” (The DSM-5 is the new edition of the reference manual used to treatment mental disorders in the U.S.)

So is any of this true? In a word, no. This is “science” journalism at its worse.

Suicide.

It remains a topic few health professionals want to discuss openly with their patients. It remains a topic avoided even by many mental health professionals. Policy makers see it as a black hole without an obvious solution.

And now grim new statistics confirm a disturbing trend — more people are taking their own lives than ever before in the U.S.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released statistics yesterday showing that 33,687 people died in motor vehicle accidents, while nearly 5,000 more — 38,364 — died by suicide. Middle-aged Americans are making up the biggest leap in the suicide rate.

It’s data that should make us sit up and think.

I was going to comment on health care expenditures with an article entitled, “How the High Cost of Health is My Fault.” In it, I would briefly outline my experience with mental illness and detail the cost of caring for it, which, at present, includes medication and doctor visits, totals at least $10,500 per year. Much of this cost is borne by an insurance company.

Then I was going to relate the story about how, in the summer of 2002, I chose to stop taking my medicine the way my doctor directed me to take it, and then I stopped taking my medicine at all.

This was a bad choice. As a result, my illness became an emergency.

Nine hours in the ICU, four days in a private room, and two more weeks of hospital care brought a bill that topped $95,000.

The cost of nine years of care was eaten up by just a few weeks of my irresponsibility. That was cost that the health care industry, including my insurance company, would not have had to bear if I had only taken my medicine as directed.

If you were hoping to get some medications prescribed for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) while in college or at university, you might be in for a rude surprise.

Colleges and university are cutting back on their involvement with ADHD, primarily due to abuse of the psychiatric medications — stimulants like Ritalin — prescribed to treat the disorder. Students — whether they are malingering the symptoms or actually have it — are prescribed a drug to treat ADHD (sometimes from different providers in different states), then sell a few (or all the) pills on the side. Profit!

Now universities are becoming wise to the epidemic nature of the problem, as some studies have suggested up to a third of college students are illicitly taking ADHD stimulants.

This might help curb the abuse problem, but will it also make it harder for people with actual ADHD to receive treatment?

Pro-anorexia (or “pro-ana”) groups have been around online for over a decade, and we first discussed them here five years ago. More recently, with the rise of social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, these groups have found a new life. Often associated with the label “thinspiration,” these groups elevate the idea of being thin to a virtual religion.

People who are all about thinspiration engage in disordered eating in order to be as thin as possible — a common symptom of anorexia. But they don’t see it as a disorder or a problem, making this an insidious problem.

Nonetheless, such eating and self-image problems can result in health problems, even putting the individual’s life at risk.

Some people have sought to get common words or terms that people engaged in thinspiration use banned from social networking websites. One such woman is Torri Singer, a broadcast journalism major who has recently begun a petition to get such terms banned from Twitter.

Hyundai, the world’s fourth largest automobile manufacturer in the world, apparently believes showing a man trying to kill himself in one of their vehicles is good marketing. The ad, called “Pipe Job” and created by the ad agency Innocean Europe, depicts a man taping a hose from a Hyundai ix35‘s exhaust pipe into the cabin, trying to commit suicide.

It then shows the man sitting in the cabin, waiting to die.

A few frames later, the garage lights come back on, and the man opens the garage door. The tag line is, “The New ix35 with 100% water emissions.”

Yes, very tasteful. Maybe if you were brain and dead and haven’t been alive for the past three decades. Nothing like making fun of people with mental illness, clinical depression, or a disability, is there Hyundai (and Innocean)??

Warning, we’ve included a copy of the video below. Do not continue on if you don’t wish to watch it.

Nearly three years ago, we reported on the kerfuffle over psychologists who were upset to find that the “mandatory assessment” fee they thought was, well, mandatory turned out to be entirely optional. The fee was being paid to the American Psychological Association (APA), the professional guild association for psychologists, to fund a legally separate organization, the APAPO, tasked with lobbying (mostly at the state level — not the federal level).

A class-action lawsuit against the APA was thrown out earlier last year on technical grounds (but with prejudice, suggesting a new lawsuit has a harder road to climb).

Despite that, a new lawsuit was recently filed in federal court in California “accusing the group of misleading its members into paying a fee used to fund its lobbying arm as part of their annual dues.”

I fall into the category of the “uninsurable.”

It doesn’t matter that I wake up most mornings to swim 160 laps, am borderline obsessed with eating salads and whole grains, and that I haven’t drank a drop of alcohol in 24 years; that I do yoga twice a week, keep a mood journal, engage in cognitive behavioral therapy, and have a rich spiritual life; that I take omega-3 fish oil capsules, vitamin D, calcium, and other supplements with my extra-pulp juice in the morning; or that I work really hard at communicating anger, frustration, and disappointment so that the repression of feelings doesn’t end up as a tumor somewhere inside my body.

I can’t get an individual or family plan short of signing up for a $10,000 deductible.

Because I have a history of depression.