Stanton Peele, psychologist, addiction expert, and blogger for Psychology Today, discusses the proposed changes to The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

It was unfortunate that Jami Floyd, substituting for Brian Lehrer, started the conversation with a Tiger Woods sex addiction comment. But if you listen until the end, there is some good, but scattered, discussion on dimensional assessment–a scale of severity–being added in DSM-5.   For example, in the past alcohol abuse was a yes/no diagnosis: either you were an alcoholic or not.  With a graduated scale, the doctor can better characterize how alcohol abuse disrupts a patient’s life without being diagnosed as an alcoholic.

Dr. Peele concludes by emphasizing the point that disorders are only disorders if they disorder your life. And then he calls Floyd on her trivializing the word “addiction” during her wrap-up. That was probably lost on many listeners.