Diagnosis and DSM is a nice little scholarly monograph critiquing modern psychiatry from a Foucauldian and semiotic perspective. Stijn describes the transition from prototypical diagnosis in early psychiatry (similarity to a prototype or best example of a condition) to the post-DSM-III criterion based system, which looks for mental disorders as a number of checklists. The DSM is a polythetic, socially constructed, system of classification; one that has not resolved the reliability problem which was the ostensible reason for reforming the DSM in the 1970s (the low odds of two psychiatrists agreeing on the same diagnosis for a patient); and has not guided quality research--as the recently developed NIMH bioneural Research Domain Criterion hope to demonstrate.

The work is all well and good, although I think it could've used more original research on the DSM-5. The problem, as with most critique, is the 'so-what' question: so the DSM-5 follows naive medical semiotics? So mental disorders are reflexive kinds, tied to human experience and expert driven orderings? How does this prove that psy-professionals are undeserving of their authority, or that the DSM-5 is inadequate for understanding the trajectory of individual suffering. Why, if the DSM is as weak as Stijn and the historical anti-psychiatry movement suggest it is, has it endured?