Christopher Lane (PhD, University of London) is a regular contributor to Psychology Today who taught medical humanities, Victorian studies, and the history of medicine at Northwestern University until his early retirement in 2022. A former Guggenheim fellow, awarded the Prescrire Prize for Medical Writing, he remains a member of the university’s Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities. He taught previously at Emory University and has held Northwestern’s Pearce Miller Research Professorship.

Lane is the author of six books, most recently Surge of Piety: Norman Vincent Peale and the Remaking of American Religious Life (Yale, 2016), on Peale’s self-described “religio-psychiatric” clinic and movement in the 1950s. His other books include The Age of Doubt: Tracing the Roots of Our Religious Uncertainty (Yale, 2011), on the history of agnosticism and unbelief, and the award-winning Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness (Yale, 2007), translated into six languages, on behind-the-scenes changes to the DSM and the creation of the anxiety disorders between the 1970s and 1990s.

His work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Slate, TIME, Huffington Post, Chronicle Review, Daily Beast, and several other newspapers and magazines.