Independent Review Of Social And Population Variation In Mental Health Could Improve Diagnosis In DSM Revisions

At stake in the May 2013 publication of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5), are billions of dollars in insurance payments and government resources, as well as the diagnoses and treatment of millions of patients. We argue that the most recent revision process has missed social determinants of mental health disorders and their diagnosis: environmental factors triggering biological responses that manifest themselves in behavior; differing cultural perceptions about what is normal and what is abnormal behavior; and institutional pressures related to such matters as insurance reimbursements, disability benefits, and pharmaceutical marketing. In addition, the experts charged with revising the DSM lack a systematic. way to take population-level variations in diagnoses into account. To address these problems, we propose the creation of an independent research review body that would monitor variations in diagnostic patterns, inform future DSM revisions, identify needed changes in mental health policy and practice, and recommend new avenues of research. Drawing on the best available knowledge, the review body would make possible more precise and equitable psychiatric diagnoses and interventions

Rotation of planet-harbouring stars

The rotation rate of a star has important implications for the detectability, characterisation and stability of any planets that may be orbiting it. This chapter gives a brief overview of stellar rotation before describing the methods used to measure the rotation periods of planet host stars, the factors affecting the evolution of a star's rotation rate, stellar age estimates based on rotation, and an overview of the observed trends in the rotation properties of stars with planets.Comment: 16 pages, 4 figures: Invited review to appear in 'Handbook of Exoplanets', Springer Reference Works, edited by Hans J. Deeg and Juan Antonio Belmont

Dust Transport and Processing in Centrifugally Driven Protoplanetary Disk Winds

There is evidence that protoplanetary disks including the protosolar one-contain crystalline dust grains on spatial scales where the dust temperature is lower than the threshold value for their formation through thermal annealing of amorphous interstellar silicates. We interpret these observations in terms of an extended, magnetocentrifugally driven disk wind that transports grains from the inner disk-where they are thermally processed by the stellar radiation after being uplifted from the disk surfaces-to the outer disk regions. For any disk radius r, there is a maximum grain size a(max)(r) that can be uplifted from that location: grains of size a << a(max) are carried away by the wind, whereas those with a less than or similar to a(max) reenter the disk at larger radii. A significant portion of the reentering grains converge to-and subsequently accumulate in-a narrow region just beyond r(max)(a), the maximum radius from which grains of size a can be uplifted. We show that this model can account for the inferred crystallinity fractions in classical T Tauri and Herbig Ae disks and for their indicated near constancy after being established early in the disk evolution. It is also consistent with the reported radial gradients in the mean grain size, crystallinity, and crystal composition. In addition, this model yields the properties of the grains that remain embedded in the outflows from protoplanetary disks and naturally explains the inferred persistence of small grains in the surface layers of these disks.NASA ATP grant [NNX13AH56G]; Hubble Fellowship Program by NASA through Space Telescope Science Institute [HST-HF2-51394.002-A]; NASANational Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA) [NAS 5-26555]This item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]

Independent review of social and population variation in mental health could improve diagnosis in DSM revisions.

At stake in the May 2013 publication of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5), are billions of dollars in insurance payments and government resources, as well as the diagnoses and treatment of millions of patients. We argue that the most recent revision process has missed social determinants of mental health disorders and their diagnosis: environmental factors triggering biological responses that manifest themselves in behavior; differing cultural perceptions about what is normal and what is abnormal behavior; and institutional pressures related to such matters as insurance reimbursements, disability benefits, and pharmaceutical marketing. In addition, the experts charged with revising the DSM lack a systematic way to take population-level variations in diagnoses into account. To address these problems, we propose the creation of an independent research review body that would monitor variations in diagnostic patterns, inform future DSM revisions, identify needed changes in mental health policy and practice, and recommend new avenues of research. Drawing on the best available knowledge, the review body would make possible more precise and equitable psychiatric diagnoses and interventions