How Shyness Became a Mental Illness

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"EVANSTON, Ill. --- What's wrong with being shy, and just when and how did bashfulness and other ordinary human behaviors in children and adults become psychiatric disorders treatable with powerful, potentially dangerous drugs, asks a Northwestern University scholar in a new book that already is creating waves in the mental health community.

In “Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness” (Yale University Press, October 2007), Northwestern's Christopher Lane chronicles the “highly unscientific and often arbitrary way” in which widespread revisions were made to “The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” (DSM), a publication known as the bible of psychiatry that is consulted daily by insurance companies, courts, prisons and schools as well as by physicians and mental health workers.

“The number of mental disorders that children and adults in the general population might exhibit leaped from 180 in 1968 to more than 350 in 1994,” notes Lane, Northwestern's Herman and Beulah Pearce Miller Research Professor. In a book that calls in doubt the facade of objective research behind psychiatry's revolution, Lane questions the rationale for the changes, and whether all of them were necessary and suitably precise."

New Book: How Shyness Became a Mental Illness, NewsCenter, Northwestern University
 
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