The Selling of DSM

Download or read book The Selling of DSM written by Stuart A. Kirk and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-29 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.