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

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”.