ABSTRACT
The last chapter demonstrated how a particularly narrow scientific concern—diagnostic reliability—was used creatively by a few researchers to justify an entirely new approach to diagnosis. Descriptive diagnosis, as this approach was called, was developed by capitalizing on the vulnerabilities of psychiatry to scientific criticism. The new approach then benefited, not from improving reliability, but by merely claiming to have done so, using data that was difficult for outsiders to assess accurately. The details of the data, moreover, were quickly forgotten in the wave of celebration over the “scientific” nature of the new DSM-III. In this chapter we continue to follow the story of DSM’s evolution.
