The third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) and its descriptive psychiatry-based intellectual antecedents imagined psychiatric disorders as discontinuous categories, presumably natural kinds, that would be empirically validated based on future scientific studies. Validation would emerge from a predicted convergence of clinical descriptions (symptom clusters that could be shown to be stable over the lifespan), laboratory results, and family studies. That future science is now arriving, but rather than validating the categorical DSM approach, large-scale genetics along with modern neurobiology and epidemiology have emphatically undercut it. Clinical description, laboratory studies, and family (now genetic) studies do not converge at all on distinct categories. Rather, modern studies are consistent with psychiatric disorders as heterogeneous quantitative deviations from health. The characteristics of these disorders have proven to be discoverable rather than invented and thus are grounded in nature. However, scientific results demonstrate that psychiatric disorders cannot reasonably be understood as discrete categories-and certainly not as natural kinds.

中文翻译：

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精神疾病：基于人类生物学而非自然类型。

《精神疾病诊断和统计手册》（DSM-III）的第三版及其基于精神病学的描述性智力先例将精神疾病想象为不连续的类别，大概是自然类型，将根据未来的科学研究进行实证验证。验证将来自临床描述（可以证明在整个生命周期内稳定的症状群）、实验室结果和家庭研究的预测收敛。未来的科学正在到来，但大规模遗传学以及现代神经生物学和流行病学并没有验证绝对的 DSM 方法，而是有力地削弱了它。临床描述、实验室研究和家族（现在是遗传）研究根本没有集中在不同的类别上。相当，现代研究与精神疾病是一致的，因为它是与健康的异质定量偏差。这些疾病的特征已被证明是可发现的而非发明的，因此是基于自然的。然而，科学结果表明，精神疾病不能合理地理解为离散的类别——当然也不能理解为自然类型。