American Psychiatric Association

Relatable, but dense. Pretty dull, too. No plot, characters were all very 2D, and there was a lot of telling, not showing. There was also no dialogue, which is something I look for in a good book.

Subject to alot of ridicule by laypersons, but when called the "Bible" for psychiatrists (again usually by laypersons) this is inaccurate. Most psychiatrists have objections to parts of it (sometimes to large parts of it), but its major use is as a dictionary with specific qualifiers. When one psychiatrist says a person has Major Depression, another psychiatrist knows that person's general symptoms, and the general severity of symptoms. That way we're all speaking the same approximate language.

This is a great reference when dealing with mental health issues. This is the official diagnosis manual that lists the criteria that mental health professionals use.

DSM-II replaced the initial DSM with a manual more intended for clinicians than for wardens of large, residential psychiatric facilities. Here we see the germ of subsequent DSMs, though the multiaxial system still has not been introduced and the very brief diagnostic descriptions (not yet really criterion-based) include psychodynamic etiologies.