Origins of the DSM and later conflicts of interest in the field

Screenshot from AHRP on the history of ADHD

From Wikipedia:

In 1888, the Census Office published Frederick H. Wines' 582-page volume called Report on the Defective, Dependent, and Delinquent Classes of the Population of the United States...In 1917, together with the National Commission on Mental Hygiene (now Mental Health America), the American Medico-Psychological Association developed a new guide for mental hospitals called the Statistical Manual for the Use of Institutions for the Insane. This guide included twenty-two diagnoses. It would be revised several times by the Association, and by the tenth edition in 1942, was titled Statistical Manual for the Use of Hospitals of Mental Diseases.[29][30]

The first edition of the DSM notes in its foreword: "In the late twenties, each large teaching center employed a system of its own origination, no one of which met more than the immediate needs of the local institution."[32]

In 1933, the AMA's general medical guide the Standard Classified Nomenclature of Disease, (referred to as the Standard), was released.[33] Along with the New York Academy of Medicine, the APA provided the psychiatric nomenclature subsection.[34] It became well adopted in the US within two years.[32] A major revision of the Statistical Manual was made in 1934, to bring it in line with the new Standard.[32

The foreword to this edition describes itself as being a continuation of the Statistical Manual for the Use of Hospitals of Mental Diseases.[32] Each item was given an ICD-6 equivalent code, where applicable.

Furthermore, the APA listed homosexuality in the DSM as a sociopathic personality disturbance. Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study of Male Homosexuals, a large-scale 1962 study of homosexuality by Irving Bieber and other authors, was used to justify inclusion of the disorder as a supposed pathological hidden fear of the opposite sex caused by traumatic parent–child relationships. This view was influential in the medical profession.[45] In 1956, however, the psychologist Evelyn Hooker performed a study comparing the happiness and well-adjusted nature of self-identified homosexual men with heterosexual men and found no difference.[45] Her study stunned the medical community and made her a heroine to many gay men and lesbians,[46] but homosexuality remained in the DSM until May 1974.[47]

The close ties between the pediatric clinic and the “euthanasia” facility Am Spiegelgrund, including connections between Asperger and Spiegelgrund’s director Erwin Jekelius (1905–1952, Fig. 2), are of particular importance in the context of this paper ([4]: 171–4). Hubenstorf also documented the relationship between Asperger and his mentor Franz Hamburger, a fervent Nazi ideologue ([4]: 93, 118–9, 126–35, 191–3; see the “‘The best service to our Volk’: Asperger and Nazi race hygiene” to “Asperger’s diagnoses compared to those at Spiegelgrund” sections)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Am_Spiegelgrund_clinic

Let the light shine on horrors that they may not be repeated in another guise

Czech, H. Hans Asperger, National Socialism, and “race hygiene” in Nazi-era Vienna.Molecular Autism 9, 29 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13229-018-0208-6

Wipedia:

Psychiatric diagnosis has proven far more complicated than anyone believed 50 years ago when the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual saw the light of day. Psychiatry has always had a nosology, or classification of diseases, beginning with the rough categories established in the early nineteenth century. Between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, psychiatric classification was shaped by individual authorities, in particular by the great German nosologist Emil Kraepelin.

How Ethics Failed –
The Role of Psychiatrists and Physicians in Nazi Programs
from Exclusion to Extermination, 1933-1945

Jutta Lindert, PhD, MA,1
Yael Stein, MD,2
Hans Guggenheim, PhD,3
Jouni J. K. Jaakkola, MD, DSC, PhD,4 Rael D. Strous, MD5

Psychiatrist Thomas Szasz fought coercion (compulsory detention) and denied that mental illness existed. Although he was regarded as a maverick, his ideas are much more plausible when one discovers that between 1939 and 1941, up to 100 000 mentally ill people, including 5000 children, were killed in Nazi Germany. In the course of the Nazi regime, over 400 000 forced sterilisations took place, mainly of people with mental illnesses. Other countries, including Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland, had active forced sterilisation programmes and eugenics laws. Similar laws were implemented in the USA, with up to 25 000 forced sterilisations. These atrocities were enabled and facilitated by psychiatrists of the time and are only one example of the dark side of the profession. This article reviews some of these aspects of the history of psychiatry, including Germany's eugenics programme and the former USSR's detention of dissidents under the guise of psychiatric treatment.

Luty J. Psychiatry and the dark side: eugenics, Nazi and Soviet psychiatry. Advances in Psychiatric Treatment. 2014;20(1):52-60. doi:10.1192/apt.bp.112.010330