Posted by badhaircut on December 27, 2004, at 14:43:32
There's a profile in the current 'New Yorker' about Robert Spitzer, the psychiatrist who edited the DSM-III and thereby "revolutionized psychiatry." (The DSM is the 'Diagnostic and Statistical Manual' that pdocs, therapists and others use to classify their patients, inmates, and research subjects. The DSM-III came out in 1980.)
Spitzer is apparently a cold fish. A colleague said: “He would never say hello. You could stand right next to him and be talking to him and he wouldn’t even hear you. He didn’t seem to recognize that anyone was there.”
Others said that he could never understand when or why people were upset or what he had done to upset them. "...After years of confrontations, Spitzer is now aware of this shortcoming, and says that he struggles with it in his everyday life."
Another said that Spitzer’s emotional myopia is HELPFUL to him as a psychiatrist: “He doesn’t understand people’s emotions. He knows he doesn’t. But that’s actually helpful in labelling symptoms. It provides less noise.”
(Okay.....)
There's an interesting description of how he chose what to put in the DSM. There'd be bull sessions of several psychiatrists around a table talking about a particular disorder, and Spitzer would just use for criteria in the book whatever was said last, or loudest, or by the person he respected the most.
The article is in the Jan 3, 2005, 'New Yorker' by Alix Spiegel, "The Dictionary of Disorder," available (for now) at: http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?050103fa_fact
poster:badhaircut
thread:434588
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20041218/msgs/434588.html