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| Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness | 
 enlarge | Author: Christopher Lane
Publisher: Yale University Press
Discount Category: Book
Selling Price: $18.00
Buy New: $12.24
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Customer Ratings:  15 comments
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 272
Shipping Weight (pounds): 0.9
Dimensions (inch): 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.8
ISBN: 0300143176
Dewey Decimal Number: 155
EAN: 9780300143171
Publication Date: December 2, 2008
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 A welcome blast of sanity for 2009 December 31, 2008
3 out of 4 found this comment useful.
Add this book to my early favorites for 2009; It's an outstanding, fascinating expose of what went wrong with American psychiatry in the 1980's and 1990's. You can see exactly where the profession went off the rails and became corrupted by drug-company money--the author got access to the unpublished material that went into the third edition of its diagnostic bible, the DSM. Some of the original material is scandalous--some, flat-out hilarious. But all of it is very relevant to what's going on with psychiatry and Big Pharma these days. I had no idea so many crazy new disorders were created in the 80s and 90s, and with so little justification. A real eye-opener, and one I'm very glad to have read.
 Another anti-neuroscience polemic by a non-expert December 28, 2008
2 out of 8 found this comment useful.
I don't like giving a one-star review. Writing a book is hard work, and I'm sure this author worked very hard to express his viewpoint in the best manner possible.
But here's the thing: This isn't an academic exercise; books such as this have real impact on people's lives and the public discourse on mental health, which is lurchingly progressing into the 21st Century. And I'm bone weary of non-psychiatric experts opining on subjects they view from afar, as intellectual abstractions -- and apparently with little compassion based on how their ideas play out in the real world. These books might better be confined to academia's stage of ideas and not presented to the public with any kind of meaningful authority.
In fact, I wish someone would write a book warning of this phenomenon:
"A strange, anti-science paranoia is spreading throughout the ivory towers of liberal arts campuses: With great pontificating authority but little factual basis, professors with no understanding of neuroscience or even current real-life psychiatric norms churn out books that would take us all back to the 19th century. These authors apparently seek to make a name for themselves with their sensationalistic cautionary tales, seldom stopping to nurture compassion for those who actually do suffer from conditions they consider 'social constructs' or 'pharmaceutical marketing inventions.' Worse yet, readers who apparently never took a biology class or were sleeping throughout the Decade of the Brain deem these tomes 'important' and 'pivotal' and 'shocking' when, in reality, they represent nothing more than exercises in ego or intellectual turf battles."
Really. It's gotten to where books such as this one, Comfortably Numb, ad nauseum are interchangeable in their jejune predictability and intellectual sophistry.
The ill-informed attitudes of such authors is matched only by the publishers who seek to exploit public fears rather than educate and elevate. I read the Yale University press release for this book and was fairly appalled.
This author's website describes his background as, in part, "a British-American literary critic and intellectual historian and the Pearce Miller Research Professor of Literature at Northwestern University. He is known for his work on 19th- and 20th-century literature and psychology, particularly its emphasis on emotion and desire."
If Lane wrote this book with these limits in mind -- offering up an historical view of literature's treatment of "psychological" issues -- his book might have made for compelling reading. Unfortunately, he overreaches his grasp immediately and with great bias, starting with chapter 1. He relates how Hippocrates never mentioned social anxiety or shyness, citing no references to prove his point. But what is the point of bringing Hippocrates into this; was ancient Greece a paragon of mental health and enlightened attitudes? I think not.
Then he skips many centuries to this: "Nowadays experts are likely to say the man has a chemical imbalance that needs medical or psychiatric attention. Any hint that his woes may be existential or circumstantial pales before this bedrock explanation: he has low levels of serotonin and needs medication to make him well again. When people are well, after all, we presume they will be social."
This is just one example of the wild leaps in this book. He cites no research that this is, in fact, what happens as a rule -- namely, that therapists and physicians don't ask about circumstances in the person's life or other strategies they've tried to overcome their difficulties. It is simply intellectually sloppy. Scientists, including neuroscientists, actually must offer evidence to support their points. It's not enough to say, "I have a PhD, and I said so."
Another leap: Lane lambastes an ad for an antidepressant that asks "Is she just shy or is it social anxiety disorder?" Fortunately, we've learned a few things in the last few centuries. That means, for one, that we can stop judging neurological impairments in moralistic terms, such as "awkward" or "reclusive" and even "misfit." Maybe such terms make for more entertaining, colorful historical narratives, and certainly we would lose many compelling plot twists and turns in literature if characters' mental illnesses were treated.
But we're not talking about literature. We're talking about real people, many of whom still suffer from these Victorian judgments when they could be receiving legitimate help. And they suffer precisely because too many liberal-arts types recoil from letting science inform their attitudes and, for some reason, they are viewed by some as credible experts. They lead us to believe that "introspective" and "thoughtful" people are being rounded up, pathologized, and medicalized -- or turned into Life of the Party types in order to satisfy societal demand. That is simply not the case. Moreover, it's a little paranoid.
(Yes, I know that the author's mother acted strangely as a child and even in later years, galloping around on all fours in imitation of a horse. Perhaps she was "shy," as he suggests, or perhaps she was traumatized by the blitz in England, or perhaps she was just odd. But just because you suspect your mother's wonderful spirit would have been extinguished had she been treated medically as a child that doesn't mean it's true, or that others saw their painful shyness as a gift and require your protection.)
I say thank goodness for such ads, because they circumvent luddite physicians or therapists who simply dismiss as patient's desires to feel more comfort in social settings.
No one familiar with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual would argue that it is anything close to a perfect instrument; it is a constantly evolving set of guidelines. (Thanks to another reviewer, Dr. Petty, for providing that succinct summary.) So, I find the author's arguments against recognizing social anxiety challenges along those lines fairly specious. In fact, the blow-by-blow on the DSM was simply painful to read -- obsessional and tedious and, in many ways, simply irrelevant to his points.
Lane would do well to get out in the real world and talk to treating psychiatrists and especially to people who've lived with brain conditions that, by curtailing their ability to interact socially, have limited their careers, their relationships, and all aspect of their lives. By denying and minimizing their very real deficits in reading social cues, processing dialogue, and more, we simply show our ignorance - and lack of empathy.
Gina Pera
Is It You, Me, or Adult A.D.D.? Stopping the Roller Coaster When Someone You Love Has Attention Deficit Disorder
ADHDRollerCoaster.com
Explains how and why psychiatrists pathologized introversion October 7, 2008
3 out of 5 found this comment useful.
This book is one of a growing number that question the scientific basis of psychiatry and in particular the pharmaceutical treatment of newly pathologized mental conditions. Lane convincingly describes how psychiatrists invent diagnoses based on quick-and-dirty studies, and how drug companies latch onto these diagnoses to justify marketing campaigns aimed at foisting lucrative products onto a gullible public. As Lane points out, this amounts to a colossal social experiment with little foresight or attention to the public safety risks.
The strength of this book is Lane's detailed description of the inner workings of the task force that developed the third edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. The third edition heralded the DSM's rise from obscurity into the international bible of the mental health field. Lane gained unprecedented access to the APA committee's memos and letters, which illustrate just how unscientific the process was.
Lane uses the example of shyness to explore how a normal human trait can be transformed into an illness in need of expert intervention. In a culture that values aggressive sociability, being quiet and introspective becomes deviant. When this simplistic, mechanistic, and conformist approach is employed, almost anything can be turned into an illness. Indeed, the upcoming fifth edition (being developed in an atmosphere of intrigue and secrecy, perhaps at least in part in response to Lane's expose) may include such new disorders as internet addiction, sex addiction, parental alienation syndrome, and even hebephilia (sexual attraction to adolescents; I write in more depth about this and other questionable DSM diagnoses on my forensic psychology blog, at forensicpsychologist.blogspot.com). Lane makes the important point that the prevalence of a diagnosis can be made to fluctuate like the stock market by arbitrarily lowering or raising the threshold for diagnosis.
Although in exposing the inner workings of the DSM-III task force this book is quite educational, Lane's lengthy tangents and literary excursions make the book a bit disjointed at times, which is why I gave it four stars instead of five.
Those of you who are interested in more readings about how the psychiatric and pharmaceutical industries are hooking the world on dangerous drugs might want to check my Amazon list, "Psychiatry & Science - Critical Perspectives" (go to my profile and click on the lists).
best whistle-blower expose of 2008 June 10, 2008
3 out of 4 found this comment useful.
I found Shyness to be a very good book, authoritative and well researched, and adroitly written to boot. The frequent musings and interesting citations keep the text flowing at a good clip -no small feat given the amount of ground covered. A satisfying read for the professional, patient, and general reader.
Shyness meets it's match in Chris Lane June 4, 2008
3 out of 5 found this comment useful.
Shyness meets its match in Chris Lane, who takes on the difficult subject of over medicating today's children. Although I have read many books on the subject none explores them in quite so much depth nor brings such a multi-disciplined approach backed by hard research. Pharmaceutical companies are understandably threatened by something that could hurt their profit margin.
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