The director's post that now 404s
The sitting NIMH director's post on what a psychiatric diagnosis is has been quoted for a decade. Its original address returns 404; the text survives in an archive capture.
We have not finished checking this source. No judgement either way. how we score evidence
Caveat on this rating: The quoted sentence is NOT from the cited paper. It is from Thomas Insel's NIMH Director's Blog post "Transforming Diagnosis" of 29 April 2013, whose nimh.nih.gov URL returns 404, and it is transcribed from the Internet Archive capture at web.archive.org/web/20210709195956/https://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/directors/thomas-insel/blog/2013/transforming-diagnosis, retrieved 2026-08-27. web.archive.org is not an allowed citation host here, so the row's citation is Insel's own peer-reviewed statement of the same position, co-authored with Cuthbert in the same year - a source that is still hosted and still resolves. The blog's full sentence opens "Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS,"; the row quotes from "the DSM diagnoses" onward, verbatim.
The most quoted sentence about psychiatric diagnosis was written by the director of the National Institute of Mental Health. Its original web page now returns 404.
Significant findings
In April 2013, weeks before DSM-5 arrived, Thomas Insel wrote on the NIMH Director's Blog.
An Internet Archive capture dated 9 July 2021 preserves his words.
"The DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure."
The nimh.nih.gov address for that post is gone.
The argument itself is safe. Insel and Cuthbert published the same case in a journal that year. That paper is still there.
What was lost is the page a reader would actually be sent to. A decade of people quoting a government source are quoting something the government no longer hosts.
Worth asking
When someone quotes an official source at you, click it. If the link is dead, the Internet Archive usually has a capture, and a capture is a citable thing.
Source
Toward the future of psychiatric diagnosis: the seven pillars of RDoC — Cuthbert BN, Insel TR (2013)
Read the source: https://doi.org/10.1186/1741-7015-11-126
DOI: 10.1186/1741-7015-11-126
How this was scored
- Study design
- not recorded
- Funding
- not recorded
- Published in
- not recorded
- Sample size
- not recorded
- Preregistered
- not recorded
- Conflicts disclosed
- not recorded
- Independent of proponent
- not recorded
- Retracted
- No
We have not finished checking this source, so there is no scoring to show yet. “We have not checked this yet” and “this is disputed” are different statements, so no scored band is shown rather than a low one.
Read the full scoring rubric, including what it can't tell you.
Published August 31, 2026.
Questions
How strong is the evidence behind this?
Resolv rates this source "not yet assessed". We have not finished checking this source. No judgement either way. One caveat travels with that badge: The quoted sentence is NOT from the cited paper. It is from Thomas Insel's NIMH Director's Blog post "Transforming Diagnosis" of 29 April 2013, whose nimh.nih.gov URL returns 404, and it is transcribed from the Internet Archive capture at web.archive.org/web/20210709195956/https://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/directors/thomas-insel/blog/2013/transforming-diagnosis, retrieved 2026-08-27. web.archive.org is not an allowed citation host here, so the row's citation is Insel's own peer-reviewed statement of the same position, co-authored with Cuthbert in the same year - a source that is still hosted and still resolves. The blog's full sentence opens "Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS,"; the row quotes from "the DSM diagnoses" onward, verbatim. The score is calculated from recorded facts about the source — study design, funding, publication venue, sample size, preregistration — not typed in by an editor.
What is the source for this?
Toward the future of psychiatric diagnosis: the seven pillars of RDoC — Cuthbert BN, Insel TR (2013). DOI: 10.1186/1741-7015-11-126. The full source is linked on this page so you can read it yourself.
Is this medical advice?
This is information to bring to your prescriber, not medical advice and not a reason to change anything on your own. Nothing here is an instruction to stop or reduce a medication. If you are in crisis, call or text 988.
This is information to bring to your prescriber, not medical advice and not a reason to change anything on your own. Nothing here is an instruction to stop or reduce a medication. If you are in crisis, call or text 988.