DSM-IV. Introduction

Kerrington Hill

DSM-IV. Introduction.

The “Introduction to Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” is a historical background review of the DSM-IV written by the American Psychiatric Association. The section is broken down into two pieces: Historical Background and Definition of Mental Disorder. Each part of the sections chronologically leads to how the DSM-IV was created.

The opening of the Historical Background section explains the difficulty of categorizing mental disorders. Mental disorders were difficult to classify because of how complex each disorder had become over the past two thousand years. Instead of gathering information of mental disorders, nomenclatures were recorded. Even then, there were too many different objectives to classify such as clinical, research and statistical setting. Therefore, many variations of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) were created.

The United States attempted to gather statistical information on mental disorders through Census from 1840-1880. The first category to be recorded was “idiocy/insanity” and later included “mania, melancholia, monomania, paresis, dementia, dipsomania, and elipsy. These classifications were the first five editions of the ICD. However, after World War 2, the World Health Organization (WHO) was successfully able to publish ICD-6, an ICD with a specific section for mental disorders. ICD-6 was soon revised in 1952 and published as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual: Mental disorders or (DSM-1). The DSM series were “glossary of descriptions of diagnostic categories and was the first official manual of mental disorders to focus on clinical utility. Each release of the DSM was directly corresponded with the ICD’s and was a revision of the previous versions.

DSM-1: Focused on reactions to the personality from factors such as psychological, social, and Biological.

DSM-II: Removed the term Reaction

DSM-III: Featured “Methological innovations, explicit diagnostic criteria, multiaxial system, and a descriptive approach that attempted to be neutral with respect to theories of etiology.”

DSM-IV: Describes mental disorders as “ psychological syndrome or a pattern that occurs in an individual and that is associated with present distress.

The last section, Definition of Mental Disorder, focuses on the content of DSM-IV. DSM-IV classifies medical conditions by “levels of abstraction- structural pathology, symptom presentation, deviance from physiological norm and etiology) and through concepts such as distress, irrationality and disability. Even though the DSM-IV provides a vast classification of mental disorders, there is no clear definition of a mental disorder. This is because many mental disorders are correlated with physical disorders and vice versa. DSM-VI also defines that an illness should be specific to increased risks of suffering related to symptoms, disabilities or impairments. On the other hand, DSM-IV does not believe that particular events such as deaths in family can lead to illnesses.

Works Cited

American Psychiatric Association. “Historical Background” and “Definition of Mental Disorder.” Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 4^th ed. (DMS-IV-TR). Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association, 2000. STAT!Ref Online Electronic Medical Library. Web. 29 Aug 2011.