ABSTRACT
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders (DSM; American Psychiatric Association) comprises the most commonly used guidelines to provide standardized nomenclature in the mental health field. Similar to the medical field, establishing standardized diagnosing is vital in maintaining consistency across a multitude of health settings, along with establishing a standardized deviation from the cultural norm, and can protect individuals from misdiagnosis. This chapter reviews changes in diagnostic criteria for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and substance use disorders (SUD) from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-IV-TR; American Psychiatric Association, 2000) to the DSM-5 (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Numerous changes have taken place with regard to both PTSD and SUD diagnostic criteria (Cherpitel et al., 2010; Friedman, Resick, Bryant, & Brewin, 2011; McNally, 2009; Hasin et al., 2013; Resick & Miller, 2009; Stewart, Arlt, Siebert, Chapman, & Hu, 2016). Most notably, PTSD was moved to the Trauma- and Stressor-Related Disorders category in the DSM-5, the emotional response to the event required for PTSD Criterion A was eliminated, and the symptom clusters have been modified to reflect four comprehensive clusters. For SUD, the separate “abuse” and “dependence” categories were eliminated in the DSM-5, the legal problem criterion was removed, and a new craving criterion was added. These changes in the diagnostic criteria of PTSD and SUD, which continue to be examined throughout the literature, are discussed in more detail in the following sections.100
