Description
Book SynopsisThe first comprehensive history of psychiatry's biblethe Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Over the past seventy years, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, has evolved from a virtually unknown and little-used pamphlet to an imposing and comprehensive compendium of mental disorder. Its nearly 300 conditions have become the touchstones for the diagnoses that patients receive, students are taught, researchers study, insurers reimburse, and drug companies promote. Although the manual is portrayed as an authoritative corpus of psychiatric knowledge, it is a product of intense political conflicts, dissension, and factionalism. The manual results from struggles among psychiatric researchers and clinicians, different mental health professions, and a variety of patient, familial, feminist, gay, and veterans' interest groups. The DSM is fundamentally a social document that both reflects and shapes the professional, economic, and cultural forc
Trade ReviewHis close look at the DSM is a meticulous blow-by-blow, tracking its evolution in the context of shifting psychiatric care, expanding disease taxonomy, growing pharmaceutical influence, emerging social movements, and a diverse array of personalities and identities (trans, queer) classified as disorders.
—Amy Biancolli,
MAD IN AMERICAHorowitz tells this sorry tale with skill and panache... It is the best synthetic account of this territory anyone has produced to date.
—Andrew Scull, UC San Diego,
Los Angeles Review of BooksHorwitz retains a scrupulous objectivity; but nonetheless, the tale he tells is of one of the most resounding and damaging follies of modern scientism.
—Will Self,
SpectatorAllan Horwitz is to be congratulated on a fine book that deserves to be read by everyone concerned about the state of psychiatry.
—Robert M Kaplan, University of Western Sydney, Australia,
Sushruta Health Policy & OpinionsTable of ContentsPreface
Chapter 1. Diagnosing Mental Illness
Chapter 2. The DSM-I and II
Chapter 3. The Path to a Diagnostic Revolution
Chapter 4. The DSM-III
Chapter 5. The DSM-III-R and DSM-IV
Chapter 6. The DSM-5's Failed Revolution
Chapter 7. The DSM as a Social Creation
Notes
References
Index
