Historical review of diagnosis …show more content…
Concern with appearance is not just an aberration of Modern Western culture. Every period of history has had its own standards of what is and is not beautiful, and every contemporary society has its own distinctive concept of the ideal physical attributes. In the 19th Century being beautiful meant wearing a corset – causing breathing and digestive problems. Now we try to diet and exercise ourselves into the fashionable shape – often with even more serious consequences. Advances in technology and in particular the rise of the mass media have caused normal concerns about how we look to become obsessions. The next major historical reference to “dysmorphophobia” was by the French psychiatrist Pierre Janet, who described a woman who was housebound for 5 years. He considered the diagnosis to be part of an obsessive compulsive neurosis which he described as “l’obsession de la honte du corps” (“obsessions of shame of the body”). Also Freud and subsequently Brunswick described the most famous case of BDD known as the “Wolf Man” who was preoccupied by imagined defects of his nose. Dysmorphophobia was also first described in the American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of DSM III in 1980 as an example of an “atypical somatoform disorder” without any diagnostic