Christopher Lane's Shyness Reviewed in Scientific American Magazine

Scientific American Magazine;
Reviews; October 2007;
by Michelle Press; 1 Page(s)

SHYNESS: HOW NORMAL BEHAVIOR BECAME A SICKNESS
by Christopher Lane. Yale University Press, 2007

Would Henry David Thoreau and Emily Dickinson be given drugs today? In the 1980s a small group of leading psychiatrists revised the profession's diagnostic manual, called the DSM for short, adding social anxiety disorder--aka shyness--and dozens of other new conditions. Christopher Lane, Miller Research Professor at Northwestern University, uses previously secret documents, many from the American Psychiatric Association archives, to support his argument that these decisions were marked by carelessness, pervasive influence from the pharmaceutical industry, academic politics and personal ambition. Lane shows how drug companies seized on the newly minted disorders to sell millions of dollars' worth of psychotropic drugs. Some have dangerous side effects; some were already developed-treatments looking for a disease. The next revision of the DSM is already under way, and Lane warns that without drastic reform many more common behaviors--excessive shopping, poorly controlled anger, defiance--can become pathologies for which drugs are already on tap.

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