American Psychiatric Association

The American Psychiatric Association is a U.S. professional organization for psychiatrists. It publishes the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and issues professional guidance.

Psychiatry: The medical specialty concerned with diagnosing, treating, and preventing mental, emotional, and behavioral disorders. The association represents practitioners of this medical specialty.
Benjamin Rush: An eighteenth-century American physician who helped establish medicine as a learned profession in the United States. His legacy was invoked by the association’s original name, the Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane.
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: A psychiatric classification manual that defines diagnostic criteria for mental disorders. The association publishes this manual, widely used in U.S. clinical practice and research.
Homosexuality and the DSM: The history of homosexuality’s classification and removal from successive editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. The association’s 1973 decision to remove homosexuality from the DSM became a major episode in its history.
American Medical Association: A U.S. professional association representing physicians and medical students. Like the APA, it represents a medical profession and publishes standards and policy guidance.
Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane: The organization founded in 1844 that became the American Psychiatric Association. It was the association’s original form, created by leaders of American psychiatric hospitals.
DSM-5: The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published in 2013. It introduced the criteria and structure later revised in DSM-5-TR.
Diagnostic criteria: Explicit features used to determine whether a condition meets a defined diagnosis. APA manuals made shared diagnostic criteria central to psychiatric communication and research.
DSM-5-TR: The 2022 text revision of the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. This is the association’s current major diagnostic classification manual.
Thomas Story Kirkbride: An American psychiatrist and hospital administrator associated with nineteenth-century asylum reform. He helped shape the institutional psychiatry represented by the association’s founders.

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