The DSM-5 is the authoritative guide for diagnosing mental health disorders in the U.S. It’s also used internationally as a research standard.
This text describes and lists the symptoms of hundreds of mental health diagnoses, conditions, and social problems. It promotes consistency and a common language among healthcare professionals and researchers.
Each mental health diagnosis has a corresponding International Classification of Diseases (ICD) code developed by the World Health Organization (WHO). These codes are used for billing and data collection purposes.
The newest version of the code — ICD-10, which was released on October 1, 2015 — contains more digits (3 to 7 digits) than the previous version (3 to 5 digits).
This expanded coding system allows for diagnoses to be more specific and account for conditions not covered in the previous coding system.