The DSM-5 is a controversial Document. This has many reasons, not all of which are its own fault. As Louis Menand puts it:
Trying to integrate these contradictory sets of expectations guarantees a controversial result. But we can make also structural critiques of the DSM-5, which can, at least to a certain extent be raised on an a priori basis. One that is frequently uttered goes somewhat like this:
To evaluate how this argument holds up, I have produced the above graphic. By using textmining techniques, e.g. the cosine-similarity measure for word vectors, I have mapped out which diagnoses in the DSM 5 that are most similar in their textual expression. The thickness of the links codes textual similarity. The size of the bubbles codes the yearly prevalence, if and only if the DSM-5 provides it, otherwise it is sized according to the mean. Please note that the similarity between some substance-disorders has not been analyzed, as I had quite limited calculation-powers and they are redundant anyway. Some of the links are not surprising at all, for example the strong links between bipolar disorders and different forms of depression. Cut-off (lowest depicted similarity) was a similarity-value of 0.15, the maximium value was 0.85, (mean = 0.3). This yields 325 links. Some links I expected are missing, for example between borderline and bipolar disorders, which are commonly considered to be hard to tell apart in clinical praxis. This seems to be a good point in case for those who wish to argue that the DSM-5 gives valuable differentiating information.