The Selling of Dsm: The Rhetoric of Science in Psychiatry

Front Cover
Transaction Publishers, Jan 1, 1992 - Social Science - 270 pages

When it was first published in 1980, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Third Edition--univer-sally known as DSM-III--embodied a radical new method for identifying psychiatric illness. Kirk and Kutchins challenge the general understanding about the research data and the pro-cess that led to the peer acceptance of DSM-III. Their original and controversial reconstruction of that moment concen-trates on how a small group of researchers interpreted their findings about a specific problem--psychiatric reliability--to promote their beliefs about mental illness and to challenge the then-dominant Freudian paradigm.

 

Contents

The Transformation of Psychiatric Troubles
17
The Social Control of Error
47
Making a Manual
77
A Careful Look at the Field Trials
121
Reliability and the Remarkable Achievement
133
The Art of ClaimMaking
161
Securing Diagnostic Turf
199
The Social Context of Diagnostic Error
219
References
249
Index
264
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