DSM5 - MEDIA REACTION TO THE EXCELLENT abc news item (March 2012) on the "Conflicts of interest for the DSM5 Task Groups." - HIGHEST CORRUPTION LEVELS IN THOSE TASK GROUIPS RECOMMENDING MEDICATION AS 'THE FIRST LINE OF INTERBVENTION.'

The fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) will be published next year, but concerns surround its financial competing interest disclosure policy and the ties its panel members have to drug companies. Last week PLoS Medicine published an analysis by Lisa Cosgrove and Sheldon Krimsky , who examined the disclosure policy and the panel members’ conflicts of interest, and call for the APA to make changes to increase transparency before the manual’s publication.

Within three days of publication the paper had been viewed over 4000 times, and several major media outlets reported on the authors’ findings and the wider issues they relate to. In the news section of Nature, Heidi Ledford drew attention to the fact that panel members with competing interests are not evenly distributed throughout the panel work groups, commenting that “the committees with the highest number of industrial links are those evaluating conditions for which drugs are the first-line treatment.” She also described the failure of the policy to require its panel members to specify participation in speakers’ bureaus, arrangements “in which a company hires someone to give a presentation about its product.”

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