The Diagnostic System

This book brings to light the difficult task of diagnosing psychiatric disorders with accuracy, reliability, and validity. Recommended. * Choice * A fluent, incisive, and eminently useful account of the classificatory system that informs clinical practice and research in American psychiatry today. * American Journal of Sociology * Sober, clear, and even-handed, The Diagnostic System is an indispensable work. * Contemporary Sociology * In an area too often marked by advocacy and polemic, The Diagnostic System provides a well-informed, judicious, and, in fact, invaluable guide to a complex body of scholarship and controversy. Perhaps most important, it addresses those complex interrelationships between individual experience and the social, cultural, and institutional circumstances that in part constitute that experience. It is an important book on a foundational if elusive set of questions. -- Charles E. Rosenberg, professor of the history of science and medicine and the Ernest E. Monrad Professor in the Social Sciences, Harvard University The particular strength of this very well-written critique of psychiatric diagnosis is to examine how the DSM has a variety of constituencies-clinicians, researchers, patients, and the general public-that each has its own way of approaching the manual. -- Allan Horwitz, Board of Governors Professor of Sociology, Rutgers University