Linguistic, Psychological and Metadiscourse Features of the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual of Mental Disorders: A Diachronic Examination of the Personality Disorders Section

Corpus linguistics is a growing field of analysis in the medical field, but despite its analytic abilities, it has yet to be utilized on psychiatry’s chief text, the DSM. This study utilizes a diachronic corpus linguistics approach to examine changes in the personality disorders sections of the various editions of the DSM. The analysis reveals that there is actually little linguistic change in the DSM from its inception to the most recent version. These findings have implications for how practitioners and educators think about, use, and teach the DSM and may impact future versions of the DSM.