American Psychiatry Scholarship: The Pendulum Maintains its Momentum - Hannah S. Decker, The Making of DSM-III: A Diagnostic Manual’s Conquest of American Psychiatry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 443, £35.99, paperback, ISBN-10: 0195382234. - Edward Shorter, How Everyone Became Depressed: The Rise and Fall of the Nervous Breakdown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 246, £19.99, hardback, ISBN-10:

Abstract

In the last year or two there has been a surge in American psychiatric scholarship and a small sampling of the contributions helps to identify the diversity of the field and future directions in it. According to Nicholas Rasmussen and Jonathan Metzl, among other medical historians, psychiatric practice in the United States should be conceptualised ‘as more diverse and eclectic, and less polarised’ than previous accounts had argued.1 In short, the biological versus psychodynamic schism in psychiatry was far more complicated than once thought. Even more recently, the work of the sociologist of medicine Martyn Pickersgill on changing discourses of social personality disorders confirmed that while the ‘pendulum metaphor’ in histories of psychiatry has a certain heuristic importance, it obscures continuity amongst psychiatrists and psychiatric discourses, and reduces a complex set of theories and practices to a simplistic either/or binary.2 Yet, what becomes immediately clear is that while the ‘pendulum metaphor’ has not been entirely transcended, the intellectual firmament in the history of psychiatry is shifting and a diversity of distinctive approaches is readily apparent. The pendulum, that is, continues to swing, just in different directions. For, as authors investigate specific diagnoses and illnesses (depression), societal units (the family) and broader structures (DSM-III), others are taking an unapologetically cultural approach to the history of psychiatry.