many other followed these medications so that now drug therapy is a huge part of mental illness treatment. The twenty-first century brought many other commonly used drugs for mental health management, such as Prozac and other SSRI drugs, which are also called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. This has led to even fewer hospitalizations and commitments with a bigger emphasis on outpatient management of mental illness. This is helpful for many but not helpful for those who need to have inpatient stays or who cannot afford medications for their mental illness. Others use drugs for recreational purposes and there is always the potential for abuse or a black market for certain drugs.
EMERGENCE OF THE DSM The DSM or Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders came out of a need to classify the different mental illnesses. The 1840 census was the first to ask about insanity or idiocy in the population, providing a general way of understanding the epidemiology of mental illness. This was fraught with problems because there were parts of the country that labeled all African Americans as having insanity of some kind. The American Psychiatric Association or APA existed under a different name as of 1844 but became what it is now called in 1921. Later censuses began describing people in terms of more specific mental illnesses, such as melancholia, mania, epilepsy, and paresis. The APA also adopted these categories. They developed a manual in 1917 to guide mental hospitals. It was called the Statistical Manual for the Use of Institutions for the Insane. There were just 22 diagnoses in it. A brand new classification method was developed in 1943 known as Medical 203. This was a psychiatric manual less focused on institutions and more on mental illness in general. It was put out by a division of the US Office of the Surgeon General. It was adopted by the US Armed Forces in dealing with mentally ill soldiers and veterans. In 1949, the WHO put out its International Statistical Classification of Diseases or ICD that first had a section about mental disorders. It was similar to the Medical 203 document using categories based on the 1943 document.
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