This paper aims to analyze two criticisms concerned with the publication of DSM-V that focused the attention of the international community: the criticism of Thomas Insel, Director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), and the criticism made by Allen Frances, who was the head of the task force that developed the DSM-IV. Both will be analyzed having as frame the courses given by Michel Foucault at the Collège de France, particularly The abnormals, Psychiatric power, and Security, territory and population. Besides these two criticisms, it will also analyze Ian Hacking's text Lost in the forest, published after the release of DSM-V. Hacking proposed in this paper that we must not pay attention to each new diagnostic category (the trees), but in the general diagnostic strategy presented in the manual, considered as a whole (the forest).
DSM-5; Foucault; biopolitics; risk; psychiatry