🎉 Welcome to your fun, easy-to-understand study guide on the development of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)! 🧠 Let's dive into the adventure of how our understanding of mental health has evolved over time.

Imagine it's the 1950s, Elvis Presley's music is all the rage, and psychiatry is heavily influenced by psychoanalytic traditions (think Freud and his dream interpretations). In this era, DSM-I was born. It categorized certain personality disturbances as mental disorders, even including homosexuality, which remained until 1974. In this era, like in a detective novel, clinicians were looking into the deep past, trying to find roots of abnormal behaviour in childhood traumas. They thought homosexuality was due to a fear of the opposite sex caused by bad relationships with parents. Sounds dated, right?

By the time DSM-II was published, the world had seen a moon landing and psychiatry had seen an onslaught of criticisms. Picture a boxing ring where on one side are the behaviourists critiquing the use of unobservable constructs like "trauma" or "motivation," and on the other side are the anti-psychiatry activists like Thomas Szasz, arguing that psychiatry might just be a way to label non-conformists. Even with all this controversy, DSM-II didn't change drastically from DSM-I, retaining its psychoanalytical orientation. However, under pressure from gay rights activists, homosexuality was removed from the list of disorders.