Christopher Lane's Shyness Reviewed in Wall Street Journal

Diagnosis: Diffident
Why psychiatry's field-guide approach sometimes mistakes temperament for illness
By PAUL MCHUGH
Wall Street Journal, November 3, 2007; Page W8

If you were anxious about speaking in public, would you prefer to be called (1) a "social phobic" needing a pill; (2) a "neurotic" needing psychoanalysis; or (3) a shy person needing practice and coaching? I'd opt for No. 3, but not everyone agrees. Certainly some people have been helped by pills for social phobia and would swear by No. 1. In "Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness," Christopher Lane seems to favor No. 2 -- but that might have been expected, since he appears to have brought an affection for Freudian psychoanalysis to his investigations.

To his credit, Mr. Lane, a professor of literature at Northwestern University, notes that when psychiatrists diagnose the shy as suffering from social phobia, they mistake a variation in human temperament for a mental disorder; if anything, the diagnosis only adds to the sense of unease felt by shy people. He is also right in observing that the psychiatrists' Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), the profession's standard 900-page reference work, errs by designating other kinds of normal human variation as mental disorders and so exaggerates the incidence of mental illness.

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