Wednesday, 26 February 2014
12:30-1:30 pm
Jordan Conference Center Auditorium
University of Virginia School of Medicine
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History of the Health
Sciences Lecture
THE POLITICAL SCIENCE OF PSYCHIATRIC DIAGNOSIS
A MORAL DEFENSE OF THE DSM
Warren Kinghorn MD ThD
Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Pastoral and Moral
Theology, Duke University Medical Center and Duke Divinity School, Durham NC
The Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is perhaps the most
contested document in American medicine, vital for the organization and funding
of psychiatric research and mental health care yet perennially criticized both
from within and beyond the mental health community. Heated debate accompanied
the 2013 publication of the manual’s fifth edition, DSM-5. Critics
charged that the new edition masks political interests—e.g., interests of
psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies—under the guise of science, at
patients’ expense, while DSM-5 defenders championed the inclusiveness
and transparency of the review process and evidence-base behind the manual’s
diagnostic decisions. In this Medical Center Hour, psychiatrist and theologian
Warren Kinghorn argues for a mediating alternative: that the DSM may be
best understood as neither an apolitical “encyclopedia” of psychopathology nor
a political cloak for psychiatric power but rather as a working document of a
living moral tradition—in this case, the tradition of American psychiatry.
Understanding psychiatry as a moral tradition, and psychiatric diagnosis as
tradition-constituted discourse, allows for appreciation of the DSM as a
useful scientific document that reflects the moral assumptions and convictions
of the communities that created and continue to sustain it.
Co-presented with the
History of the Health Sciences Lecture Series
