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Since it was introduced in the United States in 2009, the unicode emoji library has become an important addition to text-based communication. While emoji pictographs have become a source of playful self-expression, the library’s illustrated range of facial expressions have found a more practical application adding emotional context to conversations that lack facial expressions and body language. Through that usage, emoji have become an index of human emotion, redefining the breadth and depth of the feelings we can communicate through text.

The American Psychiatric Association’s DSM (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) is an encyclopedia of mental illness. While its diagnoses have been criticized as superficial, subjective, culturally biased, and unnecessarily medicalizing natural human behavior, it remains the near universal authority on mental health. The DSM-E juxtaposes these two catalogues of human experience, replacing the language of the DSM with emoji, replacing pathology with self-expression.

The DSM-E contains a library of 30 emoji, carefully designed through extensive research aided by mental health professionals and patients, to represent a selection of DSM-V diagnoses (i.e. Generalized Anxiety Disorder, OCD, Autism Spectrum Disorder, etc.). The application will allow users to integrate the DSM-E emoji library into traditional SMS communication