Overview

The first comprehensive history of psychiatry's bible--the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Over the past seventy years, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, has evolved from a virtually unknown and little-used pamphlet to an imposing and comprehensive compendium of mental disorder. Its nearly 300 conditions have become the touchstones for the diagnoses that patients receive, students are taught, researchers study, insurers reimburse, and drug companies promote. Although the manual is portrayed as an authoritative corpus of psychiatric knowledge, it is a product of intense political conflicts, dissension, and factionalism. The manual results from struggles among psychiatric researchers and clinicians, different mental health professions, and a variety of patient, familial, feminist, gay, and veterans' interest groups. The DSM is fundamentally a social document that both reflects and shapes the professional, economic, and cultural forces associated with its use. In DSM, Allan V. Horwitz examines how the manual, known colloquially as psychiatry's bible, has been at the center of thinking about mental health in the United States since its original publication in 1952.

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Allan V. Horwitz is a Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of Sociology Emeritus at Rutgers University. He is the author or coauthor of eleven books, including Anxiety: A Short History, PTSD: A Short History, and Creating Mental Illness. Rich Miller has been a storyteller since he was a kid. When he was around ten, he turned the tables on the parents that had instilled a love of books in him: He started reading to his family after dinner every night (his favorites were The Lemonade Trick and The Big Joke Game, by Scott Corbett, but Encyclopedia Brown stories were a big hit as well). Later in life, he found out that people liked having stories acted out for them. He's performed onstage in everything from Shakespeare to Damn Yankees to August: Osage County, and starred in the indie feature Ocatilla Flat. And now he's acting out stories in front of a microphone. Except for when he's dodging Tucson drivers on his bicycle, or finding the next great Happy Hour locale.

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