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Dsm-5: The Delayed Demise Of Descriptive Diagnosis, Tomi Gomory

Tomi Gomory

In 1980, DSM-III adopted a descriptive approach to psychiatric diagnosis, creating checklists of unwanted behaviors to define and use as required criteria when posing each of several hundred diagnoses. The objective of this novel approach was to validate psychiatry as a scientifically legitimate branch of medicine, by enabling research into hopefully homogeneous groups of patients to pinpoint the implicit hypothesized physiological causes of the disorders the patients were presumably sharing. In each subsequent revision of the DSM including the DSM-5, however, no physiological criteria of any sort are included for any diagnosis, confirming the empirical failure of this attempt to …