DSM vs. ICD
How do the origins of the ICD and DSM reflect fundamentally different institutional priorities in the classification of mental illness?
International Standardization vs. National Categorization
Prompted partly due to WWII’s mass devastation, this concept is defined as a shared obligation and ‘shared race’ of humanity and well-being, inspired by post-WWII efforts to re-understand global health.
World citizenship
What does the WHO use to classify mental disorders?
The ICD
The text explains that one of the biggest critiques of the DSM is its connection to an outside industry that plays a major role in how mental illness is treated. What is that industry?
The pharmaceutical industry
Why has the DSM been more heavily criticized than the ICD, despite both being classification systems?
Pharmaceutical Entanglement
This “new paradigm” discipline emerged in the post-WWII era and applied certain ordered and broad methods to study mental disorder profiles, ultimately viewing them as illnesses shaped by both internal and social factors.
Psychiatric epidemiology
A key goal of the WHO that is mentioned is standardization. What are some of the things standardization includes for the WHO?
intervention of interview instruments, unification of symptom descriptions, and development of statistical methods, a common language for psychiatry
While post-WWII scientists pursued a vision of universality for mental disorders and aimed for a single international standard, later critics noted the challenges of applying this standard across diverse conditions and highlighted the existence of these types of disorders that defy universal classification.
Culture-bound syndromes
What are some structural challenges that the ICD faces and DSM mostly avoids?
Cultural Diversities
Beyond the physical, this type of mental suffering became a significant public health concern immediately after WWII.
Combat neurosis
The WHO aimed to create a global system for diagnosing and treating mental illness, but not everyone experiences or explains mental illness in the same way around the world. What is one challenge the WHO faces in creating the global mental health system?
Cultural Differences
What is the flawed assumption that psychiatric classifications like the ICD can be applied equally across all cultural contexts?
Category Fallacy
How do the DSM and ICD differ in the way they approach scientific legitimacy, and why is that difference important?
The DSM relies on consensus between the professionals, whereas the ICD has a wider international epidemiological set of data.
This process, described as gathering momentum towards the end and after WWII, is called the “decisive and creative moment for the birth of global health” by writer Richard Horton.
Decolonization
The text mentions a WHO initiative starting in the mid-1960s, which is also referred to as the WHO’s “Ten-Year Plan in Psychiatric Epidemiology and Social Psychiatry," initiated specifically in 1964. What is the name of this initiative?
The International Social Psychiatry Project