We hear a great deal about the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, version IV (DSM-IV) and revision DSM-V which is due to be released in May 2013. What we tend to hear less about in the United States are the World Health Organization’s ICD-10 Classification of Mental and Behavioural Disorders and any sort of official treatment guidelines.

In this post, I highlight some of the differences between DSM and ICD and let you know where you can find treatment guidelines for bipolar disorder published in the US and UK, so you can check them out for yourself.

I applaud the efforts of the DSM-5 Task Force and Work Group in developing more effective and specific ways of describing and quantifying mental illness and symptoms. The fruit of their efforts, DSM-5, holds out hope for improving our ability to communicate with our patients and each other with clearer language and criteria. In my book, these are welcome changes.