Understanding DSM-5. Advice for South African practitioners.

Abstract

What is a clinical case? Which were the criteria for putting people in the Robben Island Lunatic Asylum in 1847, the time when insanity was medicalized and moral management instituted? Such riddles continue to challenge, although we are doing a good job with defining clinically useful diagnoses compared to the uncertainties surrounding many somatic diagnoses such as appendicitis, thyroid disease and neuropathic pain.