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This book critically evaluates the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). Through analysis of the history of psychiatric diagnosis and of the handbook itself, it argues that the DSM-5 has a narrow biomedical approach to mental disorders, and proposes a new contextualizing model of mental health symptoms.

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1. Dynamics of Decision Making in the DSM: the Issue of Reliability 2. Context and Diagnosis in the DSM: the Issue of Validity

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"Vanheule´s book is of special importance for people working in the helping professions. In particular, it offers clinicians, educators and students in training - regardless of framework - ways of formulating the pressing presence of the medical model. ... For those who are in any kind of psychotherapy-training programme, this book can offer a complex picture of current the idealisations at work around the clinical imagination in conversation with their historical, clinical and social aspects." (Aziz Guzel, Psychodynamic Practice, March, 2017)

"Stijn Vanheule´s book is very important and should be read by anyone who works with people with mental disorders such as psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, social workers and care workers. It should also be read by anyone who is interested in studying the field of mental disorders such as researchers, academics and scholars." (Rik Loose, Lacunae, Vol. 2 (1), 2014)

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Stijn Vanheule is a clinical psychologist, associate professor at Ghent University, Belgium, and psychoanalyst in private practice (member New Lacanian School for Psychoanalysis). He is the author of the book The Subject of Psychosis: A Lacanian Perspective, and of multiple papers on Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic research into psychopathology, and clinical diagnosis.

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