Front Matter

Preface

SECTION I

1 Introduction to the Diagnostic Interview

2 Alliance Building During a Diagnostic Interview

3 The 30-Minute Diagnostic Interview

4 Personalizing Diagnoses Through Dimensions

5 Key Changes in DSM-5-TR

SECTION II

6 The DSM-5-TR Diagnostic Interview

SECTION III

7 A Brief Version of DSM-5-TR

8 Six Questions to a Differential Diagnosis

9 A Mental Status Examination: With Essential Psychiatric Glossary

10 Mental Health Treatment Planning

11 The American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology Clinical Skills Evaluation

12 Selected DSM-5-TR Assessment Measures

13 Dimensional Diagnosis of Personality Disorders

14 Alternative Diagnostic Systems and Rating Scales

References

Index

You help others when you use the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Text Revision (DSM-5-TR; American Psychiatric Association 2022), an expansive catalog of mental illness, as a way to seek understanding of the people you meet as patients. For each illness, it provides diagnostic criteria and discusses the disorder from perspectives as diverse as culture, development, gender, genetics, law, and temperament. This book, The Pocket Guide to the DSM-5-TR Diagnostic Exam, is a pragmatic companion, a map for using DSM-5-TR when encountering another person for a diagnostic interview. This book is no replacement for either DSM-5-TR itself or psychiatric interview textbooks (see, e.g., MacKinnon et al. 2016; Shea 2017; Simpson and McDowell 2019; Sullivan 1954), but turns DSM-5-TR into a tool for an impactful diagnostic interview.

I often interview patients with students, trainees, and fellow practitioners, and I wrote this book so interviewers at all levels of experience could incorporate the structure of DSM-5-TR into their patient encounters. This guide follows the structure of DSM-5-TR. In the first section, I introduce the diagnostic interview. The first and second chapters address the goals of a diagnostic interview. The third chapter provides an efficient structure for learning the diagnostic interview. The fourth and fifth chapters describe how DSM-5-TR alters the interview. In the second section, I operationalize DSM-5-TR criteria for clinical practice. In the third section, I include diagnostic tools and additional information.

Taken as a whole, this book helps a clinician accurately diagnose a person in mental distress while establishing a therapeutic alliance, which remains the goal of any psychiatric encounter, even one as brief as a diagnostic interview.

Before beginning, a few words about language. In this book, because personhood precedes illness or consumption, I use the term person to describe the object of the initial diagnostic interview. When possible, I use gender-neutral terms for the person and the interviewer, but when doing so is grammatically awkward, I use the singular they. When speaking about a person who has entered psychiatric treatment after an initial interview, I use the term patient because it acknowledges the vulnerability of the person in treatment and the responsibilities assumed by mental health professionals when they care for patients (Radden and Sadler 2010). By using patient, I am not endorsing medical paternalism. Rather, I am emphasizing that the particular and protected relationships that develop in clinical encounters are better described as therapeutic relationships between a patient and clinician than as therapeutic contracts between a consumer and provider.