DSM was developed not as a diagnostic guide for mental health providers, but as an indexing tool to permit wardens and other officials as large, residential psychiatric facilities to characterize their inmates for documenting and funding purposes. The descriptions of disorders are brief, not especially etiological, and assume that if you had the book in hand, you didn't need anyone to describe the diagnostic characteristics of, say, Inadequate Personality Disorder to you.

APA (I mean the other APA, not the American Psychological Association) reissued this inaugural volume on its 50th-ish anniversary. It's quite fascinating to compare to subsequent editions (DSM-II, DSM-III, DSM-III-R, DSM-IV, DSM-IV-TR, and the forthcoming DSM-5), which are criticized for being weightier tomes.* Look at DSM or DSM-II, though, and you might be glad for the heft of later editions, whose proliferation of pages is accounted for less by infinitely finer gradations of diagnosis, though those exist, or by pathologizing more aspects of behavior, though those exist as well, but bu observable criteria that, though one may take exception to them, do at least let us know that we are arguing about the same phenomena.

*Yes, I own them all. Are you jealous?

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