DSM ‐ I and DSM ‐ II

Abstract

In the early 1950s the psychiatric profession produced a new classification of psychiatric disorders: the Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders. This manual addressed the need of community-based clinicians to classify the various conditions that their outpatients presented. It was driven by psychodynamic assumptions that were more concerned with the underlying problems patients had than with the overt symptoms they displayed. Thus, its definitions, as well as those in its successor, the DSM-II , were short, general, and infused with theory. As psychiatry became more research oriented and biologically grounded in the 1970s, the DSM-I and DSM-II were no longer suitable classificatory manuals. They were replaced by the symptom-based and theoretically neutral DSM-III in 1980. This and its successors have guided psychiatric classifications until the present.