The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry

by Gary Greenberg

No honest psychiatrist will claim that she cured Sandy’s, or anyone’s, mental illness; and while she is being honest, she may acknowledge that, for the most part, her treatments are targeted at symptoms, not diseases, and that she selects them as much by intuition and experience as by scientific evidence.

The problems began in 1949, before the first DSM was published, when a psychologist showed30 that psychiatrists presented with the same information about the same patient agreed on a diagnosis only about 20 percent of the time.