Between being healthy and becoming comatose: the neuropsychiatric landscape of critical illness with a focus on delirium, DSM-5 and ICD-11

Abstract

Background

One of the most important questions remaining in matters of critical illness in the year 2019 is arguably how to address the diverse neuropsychiatric complications of critical illness.

Main text

The ICD-11 and DSM-5, two of the world’s leading classification systems, disagree regarding important aspects of delirium; moreover, they do not mention critical illness and its neuropsychiatric complications at all.

Conclusions

It would have been desirable for the committees revising the DSM-IV-TR and ICD-10 to have joined forces in order to generate classification systems that complement each other and, moreover, that address the “The Neuro-Psychiatry of Critical Illness”.