The insides can become dated. (pictures of people etc.)
References can become irrelevant. (commitment to mental hospitals in the USSR as political control.)
That's precisely correct ... and people who were not mentally ill last year (maybe they were just annoying, or unhappy) are now mentally ill.
They will find more common sense in 'outmoded' texts, I might suggest. We have 1958 World Books. They are wonderful. Nothing PC in them. Psychology probably made more sense back then too.
Does "lobotomy" ring a bell?
That's sort of what happened around 1975 when homosexuality was removed from the DSM which is the bible of shrinks. That removal was the start of homo's coming out of the closet and has lead to the demands for special laws and "gay marriage" which is an oxymoron. The reason the shrinks removed homosexuality as a mental illness was that so many of the shrinks were homo's.
The "older" texts do not even consider Christianity to be a mental illness...
There have been huge technological advances which have enabled researchers to gain very specific knowledge about neurochemistry and the physical functioning of the brain, which just didn't exist 10-15 years ago. One example is the imaging technology which has allowed comparisons of male and female brains working on the same task -- in boys/men a very task-specific area in the brain shows huge activity while the rest remains dark; in girls/women, that task-specific area lights up more than the rest, but not as much as in the male brains, and many other parts of the brain light up to a lesser but very significant degree.
This sort of new knowledge is very important in fighting various ignorance-based assumptions of recent decades, including the nonsense that gender differences in intellectual performance are entirely due to "sexist" socialization. Havrad President Lawrence Summers used another example in his "controversial" statements about gender differences, pointing out that many mental problems which used to be attributed to socialization/parenting styles, etc. have since been found to be genetic/organic in origin. The key example he used was autism, which leading psychology and medical researchers once generally agreed was due to personality problems in the parents affecting how they interacted with their children. Now that advanced brain-imaging techniques are available, researchers have found very clear abnormalities in how certain areas of the brain grow in autistic children.
Are people who were mentally ill last year not ill this year?
Believe it or not!
When I went to school homosexuals were perverts and degenerates (not to be confused with the comedian).
When my kids went to school homosexuals were mentally ill.
Now they are as normal as you or me.