“Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness”
by Christopher Lane
Winner of the Prescrire Prize for Medical Writing (France)
Highly commended by the British Medical Association for its Medical Book Award
Best Book of the Year Selection, Association of American University Presses
Now in six translations
“If you’re not already concerned about the over-medicalization of our mental lives, you will be”— BBC Focus
Description
In the 1970s, a small group of leading psychiatrists met behind closed doors and literally rewrote the book on their profession. Revising and greatly expanding the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM for short), they turned what had been a thin, spiral-bound handbook into a hefty tome. Almost overnight the number of diagnoses exploded. The result was a windfall for the pharmaceutical industry and a massive conflict of interest for psychiatry at large.
This spellbinding book is the first behind-the-scenes account of what really happened and why. With unprecedented access to the American Psychiatric Association archives and previously classified memos from drug company executives, Christopher Lane unearths the disturbing truth: with little scientific justification and sometimes hilariously improbable rationales, hundreds of conditions—among them shyness—are now defined as psychiatric disorders and considered treatable with drugs. Lane shows how long-standing disagreements within the profession set the stage for these changes, and he assesses who has gained and what’s been lost in the process of medicalizing emotions. He finds a profession riddled with backbiting and jockeying, and even more troubling, a profession increasingly beholden to its corporate sponsors.
Excerpt
Read an excerpt from the introduction, reprinted in The Wall Street Journal
Reviews
“[A] fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the making of the bible of modern psychiatry [that] explains how a once-ordinary affliction became a profitable disease.”— Mother Jones
“… features the manipulations that promoted social anxiety disorder to a national emergency”— New York Review of Books
“[An] excellent new book… A welcome contribution to psychiatric discourse.”— New York Observer
“Brilliant … shows how the category of ‘mental disorder’ has been expanded in recent decades, so that what were once considered normal emotions or everyday foibles—shyness, rebelliousness, aloofness, and so on—have been relabeled as phobias, disorders and syndromes.”— New Statesman and Society
“[A] splendid book… A compelling description of how shyness—once seen as a normal variation of character or personality—became incorporated into the DSM as social phobia or avoidant personality disorder.”— The Lancet
“[A] superb, iconoclastic cultural study.”— Library Journal
“An important new book… The achievement of Shyness is to chart for the first time the events preceding the rise and fall of the SSRIs.”— Times Literary Supplement
“Fascinating … persuasive …, [Shyness] should be read by anyone interested in stopping the rot in the discussion of human emotion and thought.”— Spiked Review of Books
“Well-written and incendiary”— Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences
“A marvelous book: disturbing and perturbing, a book that will be widely talked about and debated. It is extraordinarily well written, balanced, witty, and engrossing.”— Arthur Kleinman, Professor and Chair of Anthropology, Professor of Medical Anthropology, and Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard University