ABSTRACT
In 1980 a book was published in psychiatry that would fundamentally change how we currently understand and manage emotional suffering. This book was called the DSM-III ± the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (American Psychiatric Association (APA) 1980). The purpose of this book was to list all the mental disorders which psychiatrists believed to exist at that time. The list comprised 265 disorders, and the book was 494 pages long. This list was developed to improve the uniformity and validity of psychiatric diagnosis. It aimed to achieve this by ensuring that all psychiatrists used this list to guide them in identifying from their patients' symptoms what mental disorder they suffered from. Depending upon the symptoms the patient presented, he or she would be labelled with one of the disorders listed in the book.
