Historian Edward Shorter (author of A History of Psychiatry and many other wonderful books on the history of medicine) says there will be no Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 6, and not just because statistical and mental disorders don't belong in the title.
Professor Shorter's much more vital criticism is that DSM psychiatry's chart-toppers--major depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia--lack scientific backing (see his blog: http://blog.oup.com/2013/05/dsm-5-will-be-the-last/). This attitude carried over to the title question: the earlier version of the book had been called Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders--we've always done it this way!--so we won't change it just because we dropped the statistics and mental disorders is an inappropriate designation.
There's no question psychiatrists need help sorting through the suffering patients crowding hospitals and waiting rooms. Is a flawed guidebook better than nothing?
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