James Davies

So the DSM was developed to try to identify and standardise the symptoms characteristic of any given mental illness – anxiety disorder, phobia, mood disorder and so on.’ Every psychiatrist was then expected to learn this list so that different psychiatrists in different places would all be working from the same page.

Once the first DSM arrived in the 1950s, psychiatrists were expected to use the dictionary in the same standardised way still in operation today

course, sometimes your symptoms will not fall neatly into any single category, but rather span two or three. In this case your problem will be considered ‘comorbid’ – namely, that you are suffering from a disorder that is occurring simultaneously with another (perhaps you suffer from major depression as well as panic disorder).