Christopher Lane's Shyness Receives Starred Review in Library Journal

From Library Journal, October 15, 2007

*Lane, Christopher. Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness. Yale Univ. Oct. 2007. c.272p. photogs. index. ISBN 978-0-300-12446-0. $27.50. PSYCH

Lane (English, Northwestern Univ.; Hatred and Civility: The Antisocial Life in Victorian England) takes on the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and big pharma, asserting that for self-serving reasons involving control and profit they have colluded to create new psychiatric diagnoses demonizing shyness and demanding treatment by drugs such as Paxil. Having gained access to archival materials from the APA, Lane provides a behind-the-scenes look at the haphazard, unscientific process used to revise The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, along with the equally unscientific procession of drug studies funded by the very pharmaceutical companies that most stand to profit from endorsement of those drugs by the investigating psychiatrists. This superb, iconoclastic cultural study might well be compared to Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison and Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, two major works by Michel Foucault exploring the social construction of ideas and institutions. Highly recommended for university and large public libraries.-Lynne F. Maxwell, Villanova Univ. Sch. of Law Lib., PA

For other reviews, please click here.