History of the DSM IV
In this course we’ve been thinking of all kinds of catalogs and dictionary formats, but I read this fascinating article almost 4 years ago, and thought it would be good to share with 202-ers of a very important, but different genre. It’s the incredible story of Psychology’s DSM IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) — the manual which gives an identifier and a prose description for each psychological problem, and a checklist of symptoms that should be present in order to justify a diagnosis. These numbers are used by insurance companies and doctors around the world.
The story is incredible because of its somewhat arbitrary construction(!), and problems faced that are similar to what we’ve been challenged with in this class. The DSM IV’s present form was heavily influenced by one person, Robert Spitzer at Columbia University. The vocabulary problem and semantic gap make their appearances in the form of standardizing definitions to reduce these variances:
“informational variance” — “different doctors get different information from the same patient.”
“interpretive variance” — “each doctor carries in his mind his own definition of what a specific disease looks like.” Hope you find it interesting!
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/01/03/050103fa_fact?printable=true
INFO 202 Fall 08 Blog » DSM-V - Somewhat arbitrary? Said,
December 18, 2008 @ 12:34 pm
[...] in the semester, I posted about the story of the creation of the DSM-IV classification system based on psychological [...]