The Policy of Standards. Constructing an Objective Field in Psychiatric Diagnostics on the Example of DSM-III

The article follows the evolution of diagnostic categories in psychiatry in subsequent editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), focusing on the third edition. The changes are determined by two processes: medicalization (the increase in the number of categories and expanding the scope of their application) and standardization (paradigm shift from psychoanalytic to positivist and pharmacological). From the constructivist perspective the Changes in the DSM are interesting for several reasons. They show a number of conditions such as economic interests, legal issues or social factors that take an active part in creating the diagnostic categories. The evolution of diagnostic can be seen in the descriptions of mental illness not as an expression of the progressive development of medical science, but as a transition from one paradigm of practicing psychiatry to another. Institutionalizing the new ways of describing mental illness has been done with the following elements and practices: the existence of a research collective (the individualisation of certain research domain), administering the research problems, transferring the research problems into the area of expert knowledge and make it inaccessible to laymen, rearticulating existing interests, highlighting anomalies in the old paradigm.