Past Event

Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) official classification system for child, adolescent, and adult psychopathology in the United States and, increasingly, worldwide. Psychiatrists and other mental health professionals use the classification system as an assessment and diagnostic tool. Some rhetoricians and discourse analysts who study psychotherapeutic discourse examine how clinicians reformulate patient speech so as to bring patient talk into alignment with diagnostic language (Antaki, Barnes, & Leudar, 2005; Berkenkotter & Ravotas, 2002; McCarthy, 1991). Other researchers investigate connections between the social construction of knowledge and the generic conventions of the DSMs (Berkenkotter, 2001; Emmons, 2010). Many discussants write about the authority of the DSMs’ biomedical model (e.g., McCarthy & Gerring, 1994), using epithets such as “bible” (Kirk & Kutchins, 1997), “psychiatric bible” (Lane, 2007), and “lingua franca” (Shorter, 1997) to point to the geopolitical reach of the classification system. Most interlocutors, however, take up the APA’s term “common language” to describe the discursive features of the DSMs.

This study identifies and analyzes the textual standardization of discursive and pragmatic practices in multiple editions of the APA’s diagnostic manual and, in so doing, foregrounds the manual’s history of discourse (Silverstein & Urban, 1996) and text trajectory (Blommaert, 2005). This project adopts an approach to rhetorical criticism that links a fine-grained textual analysis of metadiscourse in the diagnostic manuals to larger-scale claims about how psychiatrists’ literate practices, in this case, the textual standardization of a professional style for American psychiatry in the DSMs, index professional standards of practice and psychiatric knowledge. The project highlights the rhetorical work of the psychiatrists who standardize the stylistic, syntactic, lexical, and pragmatic practices of a professional discourse community in published printed texts, and shows how the rhetorical acts of the psychiatrists who write the DSMs help shape psychiatric knowledge through these literate practices. The study finds that, in addition to the many other purposes the diagnostic manuals fulfill (e.g., diagnostic, statistical, forensic, actuarial), the textual standardization of the professional style constitutes a handbook of usage for the APA (a “house” style of sorts). One of the central claims is that the professional style facilitates the cultural portability of the APA’s “common language” across a range of rhetorical situations. The study concludes that the development of a professional style and the textual standardization of that style in the DSMs are integral to the discursive construction of the APA as a professional scientific society and the production of psychiatric knowledge.

About the Presenter

Dr. Patty A. Kelly completed her PhD in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University. Her dissertation “Textual Standardization and the ‘Common Language’ of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manuals of Mental Disorders” was supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship and received the Best Dissertation Award 2012 in the area of rhetoric, writing, or discourse studies from the Canadian Association for the Study of Discourse and Writing. Her research interests concern the study of scientific-medical practices (e.g., orthographic and diagrammatic) as persuasive resources that bolster institutional and professional aims, goals, and commitments. She has taught discourse analysis at Simon Fraser University and currently teaches in Arts Studies in Research and Writing at The University of British Columbia.