Nosologies/Diagnostic Systems

Abstract

This chapter charts the history of psychiatric classification from the mid to late eighteenth century to the present. Though madness has a long history, formal psychiatric classifications depended upon the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century rise of the asylum and the simultaneous emergence of physicians who claimed expertise over the ills afflicting the burgeoning asylum population. To this end, this chapter traces the philosophical preconditions for a science of psychiatric classification and then the various ways in which systems of psychiatric classifications changed with transformations in the social organization of care, medical and psychiatric science, and efforts to either elide or bridge the biological, psychological, and social in making psychiatric disease. The first half focuses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England and Europe where our modern conceptions of psychiatric disease were forged. The second half of the chapter follows the evolution of American psychiatric classification in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in order to make sense of the historical basis of the current globalized and hegemonic vision of what is deemed (or not deemed) as psychiatric disease.