A study conducted at the University of Liverpool and published a few days in Psychiatry Research finds that psychiatric diagnoses as laid out by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the handbook used for identifying and diagnosing mental health disorders, are scientifically worthless and tell little about what treatment an individual might need, according to a summary published on Neuroscience News. The researchers called the DSM a “disingenuous categorical system” that covers up trauma and other adverse experiences.  You can read the Neuroscience News summary here  and an abstract of the study here.

My clients know that I rejected the idea of using DSM diagnoses for use with neurofeedback when I first started learning how to do brain training, because the DSM had no relevance whatsoever to the brain patterns that emerge from brain maps.  A person who comes to me with a diagnosis of an anxiety disorder, for example, may have any one of a dozen different energy patterns in the brain and may have a brain that looks quite different from another person with the same diagnosis.  Many of my colleagues, both in the United States and abroad, hold the same perspective regarding the usefulness of diagnoses in offering neurofeedback training.

This same problem—that a group of people with the same diagnosis may have very different-looking brainwave patterns—impacts research into neurofeedback and limits the usefulness of results.  It is my hope that one day, the psychiatrists who determine diagnostic labels and what they entail will move away from committee-created lists of disorders and symptoms, and instead actually look at what is occurring in people’s bodies and lives to determine diagnoses.

In the meantime, I continue to train brains based on the notion of training the whole brain toward optimal functioning.  The neurofeedback community DOES have an idea of what optimal brains look like from an energy perspective.