Hormone-specific psychiatric disorders: do they exist?

Excerpt

A stated goal of the DSM-V process is to try to use the biological pathophysiology of mental disorders to inform psychiatric diagnoses, including dimensional features which may cut across diagnostic categories (Charney et al. 2002; Regier et al. 2009). At this point in time, however, biological markers have not been identified which are robust enough to be incorporated in diagnostic criteria. Progress in developing biologically-based diagnoses will depend on more detailed examination of clinical phenomenology associated with particular genetic, physiological, and neural processing characteristics. It is reasonable to expect that such an effort could result in identification of syndromes that map more closely to biological abnormalities than current diagnostic categories. As part of this effort, hormone-related syndromes deserve close attention as potential diagnostic entities or potential supraordinate dimensions that would cross diagnostic boundaries. …