Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM-II

The second edition of the American Psychiatric Association's diagnostic manual, published in 1968, sorts mental disorders into brief prose descriptions rather than the operational criteria and checklists that later editions adopted. It retains the term neurosis as a working category, keeps anxiety at the centre of the neurotic disorders, and treats conditions as having underlying causes to be understood rather than symptom counts to be tallied. Its organisation follows the psychodynamic and Meyerian thinking that shaped mid-century American psychiatry, though it dropped the 'reaction' labels that DSM-I had carried.

The edition lists 182 disorders across roughly 134 pages. Homosexuality appeared in it as a diagnosis until a 1973 vote by the APA trustees, confirmed by the membership in 1974, replaced it with sexual orientation disturbance. DSM-III supplanted the whole framework in 1980, ending the descriptive, cause-oriented style this edition represents.