Tag: Robert Spitzer

Robert Spitzer, chair of the Task Force for DSM-III, discusses his decisions on inclusion, exclusion, expansion, and renaming disorders in the manual.

On December 25, 2015, renowned psychiatrist Robert Spitzer died. Spitzer was a giant in world psychiatry, best known as the architect of the third edition of the psychiatry’s diagnostic bible — The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) — the edition that effected a turnaround and became the template for how psychiatric diagnosing has proceeded ever after. As such, this death has hardly gone unnoticed, with stories about him proliferating. Most of what is written is highly laudatory. What concerns me is how to understand his “psychiatric contribution” to society.