Christopher Lane's SHYNESS reviewed in The New York Observer.

Blushing, Once a Virtue, Now a Symptom
by Juliet Lapidos
The New York Observer, October 16, 2007
SHYNESS: HOW NORMAL BEHAVIOR BECAME A SICKNESS
By Christopher Lane
Yale University Press, 263 pages, $27.50

Every student of medical history knows that the psychiatric establishment is not immune to fads and fallacies. A Victorian physician once estimated that a quarter of all women suffer from “hysteria”—a vague, catchall diagnosis modern psychiatrists have banished from clinical circles. Remember learning about “multiple personality disorder” from Primal Fear and Fight Club? That’s probably a canard, too. In his excellent new book, Shyness, Christopher Lane identifies another dubious mental illness. Perhaps you’ve read about it on highway billboards: It’s called social anxiety disorder.

Mr. Lane traces the discovery—or rather the creation—of social anxiety disorder to the late 1970’s, when the American Psychiatric Association updated its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. A small group of leading psychiatrists deleted a few entries, tweaked others, and added dozens of new mental illnesses. The science behind these sweeping revisions was shockingly flimsy. Mr. Lane reveals that the task force members conducted little systematic research, and often based their conclusions on ambiguous studies.

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