Psychiatric disorders

“During the 1970s the major psychiatric disorders became defined as disorders of single neurotransmitter systems and their receptors, with depression being a catecholamine disorder, anxiety a 5HT disorder, dementia a cholinergic disorder, and schizophrenia a dopamine disorder. The evidence to support any of these proposals was never there, but this language powerfully supported psychiatry’s transition from a discipline that understood itself in dimensional terms to one that concerned itself with categorical ones. This legitimized the rise of biological psychiatry, which in turn fostered a neo-Kraepelinian approach to diagnosis and classification, as embodied in DSM-III (Healy, 163).