The Selling of DSM: The Rhetoric of Science in Psychiatry

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.