The American Psychological Association has commissioned the creation of a roadmap to guide the next revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. They’re considering significant changes, summarized partially here as part of a lengthy update in American Journal of Psychiatry.

The central goal of the committee is to determine the strategic direction for DSM’s future. Specifically, it was tasked with conceptualizing how scientific developments can inform the structure, definition, and criteria of DSM disorders and harmonizing as much as possible with ICD-11, with RDoC and HiTOP, and with other nosological developments. Additional goals included integrating biomarkers and biological factors; functioning; quality of life; severity; socioeconomic, cultural and environmental determinants of mental health; developmental factors; and suicide risk assessment into diagnostic assessments to permit more holistic formulations. Many of these foci are being addressed through four subcommittees.

And this:

Some ideas under consideration include moving away from theoretical agnosticism and embracing biology and environment and their interactions as key determinants of mental disorders. That is, biology interacts with the contextual environment, including historical, social, and cultural experiences and their intersectionality to determine the final clinical presentation. This can be accomplished by including descriptive language but also by finding a pragmatic way to integrate biomarkers and other biological factors, recognizing that it is very early days for most of these.

The committee is also evaluating how best to ensure that the disorders in the manual, which may be close to the best we have today, not be reified. The problem of reification emerges among both clinician and patient groups as well as the public at large. Thus, the disorders come to be viewed as immutable or somehow definitive. However, clearly, as knowledge emerges about the underlying pathophysiology of disorders, including biological and environmental factors, changes to extant descriptions of disorders will be required. Moreover, the addition of transdiagnostic dimensions may aid in mitigating the risk of reification because it makes explicit that there are aspects of psychopathology that transcend diagnostic boundaries and hence categories.

I don’t see much justification for jumping from “socioeconomic, cultural, and environmental determinants of health” to “identity”–at least none was provided in that committee’s update.

The American Psychological Association’s PsychTests database contains 38,000+ constructs and 43,000 measures, according to Dirk Wulff and Rui Mata in a new CDPS article. They write:

Psychology has long struggled with conceptual redundancy, particularly in the form of “jingle-jangle fallacies,” in which different constructs share the same label or the same construct is described using different terms. This lack of conceptual clarity has hindered cumulative knowledge and comparability across studies and subfields. We propose that large language models can help address this issue by placing constructs into a shared semantic space, enabling the systematic mapping of conceptual overlap and clarification of taxonomies and generating clearer construct definitions. Although automation plays a crucial role, we argue that meaningful progress requires a coordinated, community-wide effort, combining computational advances with expert deliberation. Our approach provides a pathway toward greater conceptual clarity in psychology, fostering a more unified and rigorous framework for the discipline.

The full article is here.

American sadness this decade has been forged by the fact of, and the feeling of, a permanent unrelenting economic crisis, amplified by a uniquely negative news and media environment, and exacerbated by the rise of solitude and the declining centrality of trusted institutions. Inflation has made today’s life harder to afford, while the ambient awareness of other people’s triumphs on social media had made tomorrow’s success feel harder to achieve. The ongoing collapse of confidence in the establishment has made Americans feel unusually adrift and dissatisfied with institutions outside of their control, while the chosen self-isolation of modern life has demolished communal trust, as we increasingly experience other people’s minds through the toxic surreality of our screens rather than through the embodied reality of strangers who are, for the most part, just as nice as we are.

Derek Thompson’s piece sorts through a few years of research on sadness among all populations in the Anglophone world.

We are seeing many young people with mental illness who benefit from our treatments, yet too often they lack the personal, family, or community resources to move beyond symptom relief to full recovery. We also see a growing number of young people who might otherwise be well but arrive overwhelmed by despair, disconnected from peers and school, and unprepared for a rapidly changing world. Their families and communities are under strain and need a clear roadmap to support their children, restore connection, and bring calm and predictability to daily life.

That’s John T. Walkup of Northwestern University and president of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, in his inaugural address to the academy, published in January 2026. He advocates “population-based approaches—prevention, mental health promotion, and recovery strategies with a focus on community-based programming.”