If you didn't catch it, I sincerely recommend Alix Spiegel's profile of Robert Spitzer in last week's New Yorker.
Although the DSM was first published in 1952 and a second edition (DSM-II) came out in 1968, early versions of the document were largely ignored. Spitzer began work on the third version (DSM-III) in 1974, when the manual was a spiral-bound paperback of a hundred and fifty pages. It provided cursory descriptions of about a hundred mental disorders, and was sold primarily to large state mental institutions, for three dollars and fifty cents. Under Spitzer’s direction—which lasted through the DSM-III, published in 1980, and the DSM-IIIR (“R” for “revision”), published in 1987—both the girth of the DSM and its stature substantially increased. It is now nine hundred pages, defines close to three hundred mental illnesses, and sells hundreds of thousands of copies, at eighty-three dollars each. But a mere description of the physical evolution of the DSM doesn’t fully capture what Spitzer was able to accomplish. In the course of defining more than a hundred mental diseases, he not only revolutionized the practice of psychiatry but also gave people all over the United States a new language with which to interpret their daily experiences and tame the anarchy of their emotional lives.It's an article Foucault would have clipped and, no doubt, written about. Spitzer, the article implies, almost singelhandedly created the DSM we now treat so deferentially, and research has never verified the DSM's assertions.
“The DSM revolution in reliability is a revolution in rhetoric, not in reality,” Kutchins and Kirk write. Kirk told me, “No one really scrutinized the science very carefully.” This was owing, in part, to the manual’s imposing physical appearance. “One of the objections was that it appeared to be more authoritative than it was. The way it was laid out made it seem like a textbook, as if it was a depository of all known facts,” David Shaffer says. “The average reader would feel that it carried great authority and weight, which was not necessarily merited.”
"was good for the world at large. Good for psychiatry, good for patients. Good for everyone at that point in time to have someone whose view may have been more simpleminded than the world really is. A more complex view of life at that point would have resulted in a ho-hum ‘We have this book and maybe it will be useful in our field.’ The revolution came not just from the material itself, from the substance of it, but from the passion with which it was introduced."Posted by nchicha at January 16, 2005 03:26 AM