Diagnostical and statistical manual of mental disorders- fifth edition- dsm-5, statistics and human sciences: inflections on normalization and standartization

Abstract

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/1807-1384.2014v11n2p96

The edition of the Diagnostical and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – Fifth Edition- DSM-5 in 2013 remains on the controversy about psychiatric diagnoses. The field of psychiatry, historically at odds with psychology and psychoanalysis (as the form evaluation and therapeutic), continues to sustain a classificatory (taxonomic) quadrate practice, based on characteristics and diagnostic criteria of disturbances or verified disorders, mostly empirically. The use of statistical tools in the human sciences is questionable, and what is intended in this article is to point the guise of quantitative criteria in qualitative criteria and, by extension, the common discursive practice of confusing descriptions with appreciations, the latter with evaluative and normative judgments. A circle is closed: the frequencies (statistics) define the normalities (axiological) and these are sustained in frequencies. In this context, the elaborations of Canguilhem, Ewald, Foucault and Goffman were essential to the articulation of critical theoretical arguments.