DSM-5: a collection of psychiatrist views on the changes, controversies, and future directions.

The recent release of the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) by the American Psychiatric Association has led to much debate. For this forum article, we asked BMC Medicine Editorial Board members who are experts in the field of psychiatry to discuss their personal views on how the changes in DSM-5 might affect clinical practice in their specific areas of psychiatric medicine. This article discusses the influence the DSM-5 may have on the diagnosis and treatment of autism, trauma-related and stressor-related disorders, obsessive-compulsive and related disorders, mood disorders (including major depression and bipolar disorders), and schizophrenia spectrum disorders.

The political ecology of weeds : a scalar approach to landscape transformations

How do plants that move and spread across landscapes become branded as weeds and thereby objects of contention and control? We outline a political ecology approach that builds on a Lefebvrian understanding of the production of space, identifying three scalar moments that make plants into 'weeds' in different spatial contexts and landscapes. The three moments are: the operational scale, which relates to empirical phenomena in nature and society; the observational scale, which defines formal concepts of these phenomena and their implicit or explicit 'biopower' across institutional and spatial categories; and the interpretive scale, which is communicated through stories and actions expressing human feelings or concerns regarding the phenomena and processes of socio-spatial change. Together, these three scalar moments interact to produce a political ecology of landscape transformation, where biophysical and socio-cultural processes of daily life encounter formal categories and modes of control as well as emotive and normative expectations in shaping landscapes. Using three exemplar 'weeds' - acacia, lantana and ambrosia - our political ecology approach to landscape transformations shows that weeds do not act alone and that invasives are not inherently bad organisms. Humans and weeds go together; plants take advantage of spaces and opportunities that we create. Human desires for preserving certain social values in landscapes in contradiction to actual transformations is often at the heart of definitions of and conflicts over weeds or invasives.