The Diagnostic System: Why the Classification of Psychiatric Disorders Is Necessary, Difficult, and Never Settled

Jason Schnittker

Published by Columbia University Press 2017

The Diagnostic System

Why the Classification of Psychiatric Disorders Is Necessary, Difficult, and Never Settled

Jason Schnittker

https://doi.org/10.7312/schn17806

Overview
Contents

About this book

The sociologist Jason Schnittker looks at the multiple actors involved in crafting the DSM and the many interests that the manual hopes to serve. The Diagnostic System urges us to become comfortable with the socially constructed nature of categorization and accept that a perfect taxonomy of mental-health disorders will remain elusive.

Author / Editor information

Jason Schnittker is a professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. His work has appeared in the American Sociological Review, the American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, and Contexts, among others.

Reviews

Charles E. Rosenberg, professor of the history of science and medicine and the Ernest E. Monrad Professor in the Social Sciences, Harvard University:
In an area too often marked by advocacy and polemic, The Diagnostic System provides a well-informed, judicious, and, in fact, invaluable guide to a complex body of scholarship and controversy. Perhaps most important, it addresses those complex interrelationships between individual experience and the social, cultural, and institutional circumstances that in part constitute that experience. It is an important book on a foundational if elusive set of questions.

Allan Horwitz, Board of Governors Professor of Sociology, Rutgers University:
The particular strength of this very well-written critique of psychiatric diagnosis is to examine how the DSM has a variety of constituencies—clinicians, researchers, patients, and the general public—that each has its own way of approaching the manual.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	v
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	ix
1. THE CONTESTED ONTOLOGY OF PSYCHIATRIC DISORDERS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
2. WHAT DIAGNOSES ARE DSM-III and the Form of Contemporary Psychiatric Diagnoses Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	19
3. DSM-III AND THE DESCRIPTIVE SCIENCE OF PSYCHIATRIC DISORDERS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	56
4. RETHINKING THE DSM Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	83
5. HOW PROFESSIONALS USE DIAGNOSES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	111
6. HOW THE PUBLIC USES DIAGNOSES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	142
7. HOW SCIENTISTS USE THE DSM Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	166
8. HOW CULTURES USE DIAGNOSES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	179
9.THE CONTEMPORARY SCIENCE OF PSYCHIATRIC NOSOLOGY Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	205
10. THE ENDLESS SEARCH FOR VALIDITY Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	238
11. THE ENDURANCE OF THE DIAGNOSTIC SYSTEM Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	280
NOTES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	307
INDEX Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	333

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 368

eBook

Published: September 25, 2017
ISBN: 9780231544597