Christopher Lane's Shyness Mentioned in LA Times

Are we too quick to medicate children?
Parents who seek help for behavioral problems are increasingly likely to walk away with a prescription for powerful drugs. But some experts counsel caution.
By Melissa Healy
Los Angeles Times, November 5, 2007

Northwestern University's Christopher Lane, author of a new book, "Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness," calls psychiatry's growing focus on children "the perfect storm" for overdiagnosis.

"You've got a constituency -- children -- who cannot make informed medical decisions for themselves," Lane says. In a fast-moving culture that heaps stress and high expectations on children, "parents are in many cases under great pressure to ensure their child succeeds and is socially proficient. A child that doesn't negotiate rapidly those hurdles can look very quickly as if he or she is falling behind, or displaying behavior that warrants medical concern."

Some mental-health professionals are wary, too, of the implied promise of early intervention. In fact, whether, how or in how many cases a child's problematic behavior leads to full-blown mental illness -- what health professionals call the "progression" of the disease -- is in many cases not well understood, especially when the patient is not even a teenager yet.

As to the claim that early treatment will lessen symptoms or prevent mental illness later, there is growing evidence, but it is hardly a slam-dunk. And it doesn't address which kids will benefit from pharmacological treatment and which won't.

As the mental-health profession begins debate over how to update its diagnostic manual, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, which is set for reissue in 2012, it is debating whether it has gone too far. The recent publication of two books critical of the expansion of psychiatric diagnoses -- Lane's "Shyness" and "The Loss of Sadness," by Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield -- have touched off a flurry of discussion.

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