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Full-Text Articles in Social Work

Dsm-5: The Delayed Demise Of Descriptive Diagnosis, Tomi Gomory Jan 2015

Dsm-5: The Delayed Demise Of Descriptive Diagnosis, Tomi Gomory

Tomi Gomory

In 1980, DSM-III adopted a descriptive approach to psychiatric diagnosis, creating checklists of unwanted behaviors to define and use as required criteria when posing each of several hundred diagnoses. The objective of this novel approach was to validate psychiatry as a scientifically legitimate branch of medicine, by enabling research into hopefully homogeneous groups of patients to pinpoint the implicit hypothesized physiological causes of the disorders the patients were presumably sharing. In each subsequent revision of the DSM including the DSM-5, however, no physiological criteria of any sort are included for any diagnosis, confirming the empirical failure of this attempt to …


Social Work Practice In The Real World: An Argument For Evidence Tested Practice, Tomi Gomory May 2000

Social Work Practice In The Real World: An Argument For Evidence Tested Practice, Tomi Gomory

Tomi Gomory

This chapter explores the relevance of practice guidelines for the advancement of clinical social work by attempting to explicate the current epistemology of empirical social work practice, Justificationism, and contrasting it with an alternate epistemology, Fallibilism (Karl Popper’s Critical Rationalism). The chapter asserts the superiority of fallibilism for the advancement of knowledge and recommends its implementation. It is further argued that whether or not clinical practice guidelines are essential to practice depends on whether guidelines can be more explanatory (helpful) than some other alternative such as Falibilitic Critical Thinking (Fa.C.T.) when critically assessed against it. Examples and arguments are offered …