THE WAR ON NORMAL:

Humanity, thou art sick: With shyness diagnosed as ‘social phobia’, and dissent as Oppositional Defiant Disorder, more and more emotions are being psychologised. Or perhaps I’m just suffering from Book Review Hyperactivity Dementia (Helene Guldberg, 12/21/07, spiked)

‘In my mother’s generation, shy people were seen as introverted and perhaps a bit awkward, but never mentally ill.’

So writes the Chicago-based research professor, Christopher Lane, in his fascinating new book Shyness: How Normal Behaviour Became a Sickness. ‘Adults admired their bashfulness, associated it with bookishness, reserve, and a yen for solitude. But shyness isn’t just shyness any more. It is a disease. It has a variety of over-wrought names, including “social anxiety” and “avoidant personality disorder”, afflictions said to trouble millions’, Lane continues.

Lane has taken shyness as a test case to show how society is being overdiagnosed and overmedicated. He has charted - in intricate detail - the route by which the psychiatric profession came to give credence to the labelling of everyday emotions as ‘disorders’, a situation that has resulted in more and more people being deemed to be mentally ill.

Several years ago we posted a link to a personality test according to which all of the brothers and most of the commentors turned out to have Asperger's. Now we'd be the last to claim that Brothers Judd is a particular bastion of sanity and stability, but it hardly seems a coincidence that what we used to think of as being a perfectly normal male--especially being either reserved, on the one hand, or hyper, on the other--is now considered to be illness.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 21, 2007 8:46 AM