Introduction
Efforts to categorize and describe “madness” date back to ancient Greece; however, interest in psychiatric categorization has intensified since the turn of the twentieth century (Kirk & Kutchins, 1992). One marked event in this history was the release of the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) third revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-III) in 1980. This manual and its successive revisions have been based on a biomedical formulation of “mental disorders,” positioning them as equivalent to medical conditions (Kleinman, 1988; Wilson, 1993). This approach to understanding and categorizing distress dominates mental health practice and has infiltrated popular discourse. Despite its dominance, the DSM has been subject to extensive critique, charged with pathologizing everyday experiences, medicalizing distress, and acting as a tool for social control and a means of maintaining professional and corporate interests.
Definition
The DSM is one of the dominant...
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
References
American Psychiatric Association. (2000). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (4th ed., Text Rev.). Washington, DC: Author.
American Psychiatric Association. (2012). DSM-5 development. Retrieved from www.dsm5.org
American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.). Arlington, VA: Author.
Belle, D., & Doucet, J. (2003). Poverty, inequality, and discrimination as sources of depression among U.S. women. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 27, 101–113.
Bentall, R. P. (2004). Madness explained: Psychosis and human nature. London: Penguin.
Caplan, P. J. (1995). They say you’re crazy: How the world’s most powerful psychiatrists decide who’s normal. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Caplan, P. J., & Cosgrove, L. (Eds.). (2004). Bias in psychiatric diagnosis. Lanham, MD: Jason Aronson.
Cosgrove, L., Bursztajn, H. J., & Krimsky, S. (2009). Developing unbiased diagnostic and treatment guidelines in psychiatry. The New England Journal of Medicine, 360(19), 2035–2036.
Kirk, S. A., & Kutchins, H. (1992). The selling of DSM: The rhetoric of science in psychiatry. New York: Walter de Gruyter.
Kleinman, A. (1988). Rethinking psychiatry: From cultural category to personal experience. New York: The Free Press.
Kutchins, H., & Kirk, S. A. (1997). Making us crazy. DSM: The psychiatric bible and the creation of mental disorders. New York: The Free Press.
Marecek, J., & Hare-Mustin, R. T. (2009). Clinical psychology: The politics of madness. In D. Fox, I. Prilleltensky, & S. Austin (Eds.), Critical psychology: An introduction (2nd ed., pp. 75–92). London: Sage.
Mezzich, J. E., et al. (1999). The place of culture in DSM-IV. The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 187(8), 457–464.
Rosenhan, D. L. (1973). On being sane in insane places. Science, 179, 250–258.
Shorter, E. (1997). A history of psychiatry: From the era of the asylum to the age of Prozac. New York: Wiley.
Szasz, T. S. (1962). The myth of mental illness. London: Secker & Warburg.
Watters, E. (2010). Crazy like us: The globalization of the American psyche. New York: Free Press.
Wilson, M. (1993). DSM-III and the transformation of American psychiatry: A history. The American Journal of Psychiatry, 150(3), 399–410.
Online Resources
American Psychiatric Association. (2012). American Psychiatric Association DSM-5 development. Retrieved from http://www.dsm5.org/Pages/Default.aspx
Citizens Commission on Human Rights. (2012). Citizens Commission on Human Rights International. Retrieved from http://www.cchrint.org/
MindFreedom International. (2012). MindFreedom: Win human rights in the mental health system! Retrieved from http://www.mindfreedom.org/
The International Critical Psychiatry Network. (2012). The International Critical Psychiatry Network. Retrieved from http://www.criticalpsychiatry.net/
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New York
About this entry
Cite this entry
Lafrance, M.N., McKenzie-Mohr, S. (2014). DSM, Overview. In: Teo, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5583-7_375
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5583-7_375
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4614-5582-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-4614-5583-7
eBook Packages: Springer Reference Behavioral Sciences