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Following the Vietnam war, many campaigners and sympathetic psychiatrists felt that veterans were not being adequately diagnosed or treated for the psychological effects of combat, particularly distress resulting from a war that had been the subject of so much debate in the US. A new diagnostic category would be a means to provide the treatment needed, and to secure this treatment from the Veterans Administration in the US. Once the process to produce DSM-III had begun in 1974, psychiatrists and Vietnam veteran activists lobbied Spitzer (who was leading the effort to develop DSM-III) to introduce a category that might adequately address the needs of these veterans. As a result, Spitzer set up the Committee on Reactive Disorders, and the new category of ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’ (PTSD) was included in DSM-III (Kutchins and Kirk, 1999).

Pause for reflection

Why do you think one group of campaigners sought to de-medicalise homosexuality while another group sought to medicalise trauma resulting from war?