Published in:
01-05-2014 | Review Article
Diagnosing mental disorders and saving the normal
American Psychiatric Association, 2013. Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, 5th ed. American Psychiatric Publishing: Washington, DC. 991 pp., ISBN: 978-0890425558. Price: $122.70
Author:
Fredrik Svenaeus
Published in:
Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy
|
Issue 2/2014
Login to get access
Excerpt
In May 2013 the American Psychiatric Association finally released the 5th edition of its famous
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (short title: DSM-5). The manual had been on its way for 14 years, accompanied with high expectations as well as heavy critique from the very beginning. It is certainly a bit strange that an update of a diagnostic manual for mental disorders receives so much attention all over the world. But the way psychiatry has developed since 1980, when the path breaking DSM-III was published paving the way for a “new diagnostic psychiatry,” explains the hype. As Robert Spitzer, the chairman of DSM-III, said in an interview about the interest in DSM already in the 1980s: “It’s amazing. I guess it defines things. Why do people get so upset when they have arguments about diagnosis? I guess because it defines what is the reality”. To sum up: DSM makes things come into existence. Not a small thing for a diagnostic manual to do! Spitzer is quoted in a very nice little collection of papers attempting to analyze and evaluate the DSM-movement and its most recent result:
Making the DSM-
5: Concepts and Controversies, edited by Joel Paris and James Phillips (Paris and Phillips
2013: 17).
1 …