Search

Abstract: The DSM-III introduced a new approach of the psychiatric diagnosis by statistics, relying on the quantification of the diagnostic reliability. It thus proceeded to significant changes in the diagnostic categories. These changes were also defined by another principle called “atheorism”. This reform was undertaken by North-American psychiatry as it was crossing a form of crisis, during which the knowledge, the know-how, the autonomy and the ethic of the psychiatrists were questioned. This article intends to emphasize the social and scientific issues at stake in this use of statistics to define mental disorders. We therefore put the DSM-III in the perspective of the empiricism in psychiatry and present the way it was received and the effects it had. We venture in conclusion the hypothesis that DSM-III was a response to the question of the existence of North-American psychiatry as a profession and we try to apply this hypothesis to current French psychiatry. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]