ABSTRACT
By the early 1950s, American psychiatry as a profession was confronted with an array of serious problems. The predominant mental health treatment facilities-state asylums-originally constructed as retreats for those adversely affected by the stresses of industrial society, were the target of exposss alleging inhuman conditions, brutal treatment, and overcrowding. DSM-I reflected this transformation of psychiatry and the ascendancy of new leadership in the profession. The transformation of psychiatry's classification problem into a technical problem is nowhere as well illustrated as by the emergence of a new statistic. This transformation had another characteristic that would become much more important later. In the transformation of reliability into a technical problem, no standards were explicitly established for what would constitute a technical solution. Perhaps there has been no period in American psychiatry when the profession was not confronted by serious problems. For psychiatry, or for that matter for any profession, there is always room, and often a public demand, for improvement.
