More Med Stuff

You all probably know by now that a couple of years ago that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders came out with new version DSM V and now there is a new version International Classification of Diseases (ICD) codes.

One of the people who was on the committees to bring about those changes was Dr Jack Drescher, clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University in New York City and Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and in a video and article in MedScape he talks about the changes and the reasoning behind the changes.

In the article New Diagnostic Codes Lessen Stigma for Transgender People he says,

In addition, we removed the specifier for sexual orientation. There was a time when it mattered, for some reason, whether a person's sexual orientation was involved in making the decision to transition. For example, in the middle of the 20th century, if you were born a man, assigned male at birth, and you were attracted to women but you believed yourself to be a woman and wanted to undergo a transition, you could not tell the doctors that you were attracted to women. The doctors were only involved in making heterosexuals at the end of the treatment. They were not going to make any lesbians or gay men by transitioning people who, at the end, would be attracted to the same gender. That is not the case in terms of how clinicians practice today, but that was the case then. Thus, we removed the sexual orientation specifier because it is irrelevant to clinical work. Those were some of the DSM changes.

He goes on to say about the new ICD-11,

We also made a slight change at the international level. The World Health Organization's ICD-11 will come out in 2018. There was more flexibility in the ICD compared with the DSM, where a diagnosis is either in or out. The ICD includes all diagnoses, psychiatric and medical. The recommendation, which has been followed, is that the new diagnosis, called gender incongruence, will be moved from the mental disorder section to another chapter, called "Conditions Related to Sexual Health." This allows countries that have national healthcare systems to have a diagnosis code, to continue to provide care for people, and to reduce the stigma of a mental disorder.

I think that this could be a major step forward moving out of the section on mental disorders into "Conditions Related to Sexual Health." As the doctor pointed out in the video is that there has to be a code number in order for the insurance companies to pay for our healthcare, so the question where to put the diagnoses.

Also I have to wonder does this make gender dysphoria an intersex condition?

What do you think?

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