When it was first published in 1980, the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Third Edition
—univer-sally known as
DSM-III
—embodied a radical new method for identifying psychiatric illness. Kirk and Kutchins challenge the general understanding about the research data and the pro-cess that led to the peer acceptance of
DSM-III.
Their original and controversial reconstruction of that moment concen-trates on how a small group of researchers interpreted their findings about a specific problem—psychiatric reliability—to promote their beliefs about mental illness and to challenge the then-dominant Freudian paradigm.