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In America and elsewhere, psychiatrists use the DSM, the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders to identify a range of symptoms of conditions such as depression and schizophrenia.

This is now in its fifth edition.

The analogy here is with other kinds of illness such as smallpox or Ebola.

But is the assumption that mental disorders are discrete discontinuous categories like other illnesses, a reasonable one.

Stephen Hyman questions some of the philosophical assumptions on which the DSM categorizations are based.

Steve Hyman, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Thank you, it's a pleasure to be here.

The topic we're talking about today is the philosophy of psychiatry, and in particular, the philosophy of psychiatry and in particular the problem of categorization.

How are people categorized in psychiatry?

The current classification in psychiatry, which dates from

Emil Crapland's work in the late 19th century,

but was formalized with the diagnostic and statistical manual

of mental disorders, the DSM-3 published in 1980. diagnostic and that is discontinuous from health and discontinuous from each other.

And the DSM lists a great number of them.

So we might have a category like autism or attention deficit, hyper disorder and there would be a set of criteria

by which doctors, psychiatrists would use to judge whether you have that condition.

That's exactly right. So say for depression, there are a list of nine criteria, and if you have five of nine criteria, you meet the diagnosis of depression, and in many countries that means that your health

service or your insurance will then pay for treatment and you will have the status of being

...