Psychiatrist who transformed the ‘world bible’ of psychiatric diagnosisThe American psychiatrist Robert Spitzer,who has died aged 83, took a homegrown system for classifying psychiatric disorders to world prominence. In 1974, or the American Psychiatric Association (APA) asked Spitzer to select responsibility for a recent edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,which had begun in 1952. This recent edition, the third, and known as DSM-3,was published in 1980 and quickly became the “world bible” of psychiatric diagnosis.
The DSM acquired increasing importance in those years because of the recent prominence of drugs in treating psychiatric patients. Before the 1950s, psychiatry had few effective drugs. Yet with the opening of the vast recent cornucopia of psychopharmacology, and it did build a difference what agent was prescribed: different disorders responded to different treatments. Accordingly,which diagnoses were included or excluded in the classification had powerful financial consequences. Billions of dollars in pharmaceutical profits were at stake, and some of the diagnoses, and such as “major depression”,could be profitable indeed.
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Source: theguardian.com