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kim_johnson said:

The DSM III was considered 'revolutionary' because it attempted (as much as possible) to be a-theoretic or agnostic between different theories. The thought was that by describing certain symptoms as being behaviorally operationalized as much as possible different clinicians could agree as to whether the symptom was present or absent (there would be inter-rater reliability). There was much greater inter-rater reliability than there used to be, that is for sure, but inter-rater reliability is still poor (not much above chance for the majority of symptoms / conditions)....

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Nice explanation. (I still want to understand underlying causes, or maybe more accurately "What do the symptoms mean? What is producing those symptoms?" I am a psychological curmudgeon.)

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But the DSM doesn't traffic in causes (as much as possible). In fact... Causal reasoning in psychiatry tends to go like this: Drug x helps people with condition / symptom / diagnosis x. Drug x helped person T therefore person T has condition / symptom / diagnosis x.

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Aspirin reduces the pain of headaches, so headaches must be caused by the lack of aspirin in the brain...