“In psychiatry no one knows the causes of anything, so classification can be driven by all sorts of factors” — political, social and financial. “What you have in the end,” Mr. Shorter [a historian of psychiatry] said, “is this process of sorting the deck of symptoms into syndromes, and the outcome all depends on how the cards fall.”

The DSM-V is expected to fall into place in 2011-2012.

The article, Psychiatrists Revise the Book of Human Troubles, can be found at the New York Times online