You may have already heard our big news in psychiatry: The first major revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) since the mid-1990s has just been approved by American Psychiatric Association's Board of Trustees. And the new DSM-5 will be published in May.

Two years ago, the American Psychiatric Association announced the start of field trials of proposed diagnostic criteria for the future DSM-5. And now, as the first comprehensive analyses of that effort are published, what's clear is just how well the field trials did their job.

There has been a lot of smoke from the DSM fires. The field trials should help all concerned see through the smoke and into the embers of advancing the complex and continuous process of improving what we know about diagnosis in psychiatry.