On the eve of the release of A Dark Knight Rises, I'm going to consider whether Batman has posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the psychiatric disorder that most people may think a likely diagnosis for Batman.

The new DSM will not cause more people to be diagnosed with addiction. Instead, more people who may not yet be addicted (but whose substance use is nonetheless unhealthy) will be able to access very inexpensive but proven effective treatment earlier and more easily.

There is an inescapable conceptual struggle when dealing with America's volatile history of, and attitudes toward, substance use. In other words, the meaning of addiction is a never-ending American, and thus worldwide, cultural debate.

The American Psychiatric Association plans to release the newest edition of America's psychiatric bible, the DSM, in 2013. The effort to determine what constitutes normal and abnormal behavior in America is apparently an ongoing process.

Giving a name to difficult problems that are poorly understood provides a kind of false comfort, but the label often doesn't really add to the understanding and may carry risks of its own -- especially unnecessary treatment, stigma and wasted resources.

For what might strike a lot of people as inside baseball, the debate over the upcoming edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is garnering a lot of media attention.

I felt like I was really losing touch with my children, that there was a third force between me and them. That third force was big business, and it wasn't at all benevolent.

The latest to get called out on concocting a condition is CNN blogger and sex expert Ian Kerner, who elicited harsh reactions with Sexual Attention Deficit Disorder (SADD).

While some anxiety is a normal reaction to stress, the anxiety that interferes with one's ability to function, to handle everyday situations, is a debilitating disorder.

It's not just about overeating. When your eating is out of control, causes you distress or is impacting your physical and emotional health, you may have Binge Eating Disorder.

You've heard about the Drug War? Well there's a war being fought over addiction by the Task Force revising the psychiatric bible in the United States.

We don't have one now - we have a National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). This nomenclature has consequences

Some researchers hypothesize that sexual addiction, substance abuse, and gambling share neurochemical changes in the brain--underlying problems with brain wiring and nerve transmitters.