Product Details

YBP Library Services

A 2007 Top Seller in Medicine as compiled by YBP Library Services

Times Literary Supplement

"An important new book. . . . The achievement of Shyness is to chart for the first time the events preceding the rise and fall of the SSRIs. Lane has marshalled a cache of unpublished data to explain the academic framework that allowed the rise to happen. [He] tells the complex story with impressive clarity. . . . Lane has done a valuable job in tracing the roots of the current crisis and he certainly isn’t calling for a reinstatement of Freudianism; what is needed now is another map to indicate a way out."—Jerome Burne, Times Literary Supplement

— Jerome Burne

New Statesman and Society

"In his brilliant Shyness: How Normal Behaviour Became a Sickness, Christopher Lane painstakingly shows how the category of ''mental disorder'' has been expanded in recent decades, so that what were once considered normal emotions or everyday foibles—shyness, rebelliousness, aloofness, and so on—have been relabelled as phobias, disorders and syndromes."—Brendan O''Neill, New Statesman and Society

— Brendan O'Neill

Journal of Mental Health

“Lane’s thorough trawling of the archives of the American Psychiatric Association, his discovery of unpublished internal memos from drug companies, and most especially his accounts of the deliberately obstructive activities of the companies’ marketing teams, make for compelling reading.” - Martin Guha, Journal of Mental Health

— Martin Guha

Association of American University Presses (AAUP)

Selected as a 2008 AAUP University Press Book for Public and Secondary School Libraries.

— Best Book of the Year Selection

New York Observer

"[An] excellent new book. . . . Shyness is a welcome contribution to psychiatric discourse."—Juliet Lapidos, New York Observer

— Juliet Lapidos

Mother Jones

"[A] fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the making of the bible of modern psychiatry [that] explains how a once-ordinary affliction became a profitable disease."—Michael Agger, Mother Jones

— Michael Agger

New England Journal of Medicine

"This well-written book is a thoughtful examination of shyness and its relation to psychopathology. . . . I very much enjoyed reading Lane's thought-provoking book."—Brian J. Cox, New England Journal of Medicine

— Brian J. Cox

New York Review of Books

"Christopher Lane''s polemical Shyness features the manipulations that promoted social anxiety disorder to a national emergency."—Frederick Crews, New York Review of Books

— Frederick Crews

New York Times Book Review

"Lane argues in this well-researched . . . controversial book that shyness [has been] pathologized, to the detriment, especially, of children and teenagers"—Elsa Dixler, New York Times Book Review (Paperback Row)

— Elsa Dixler

Spiked Review of Books

"Fascinating . . . persuasive . . . [and] painstaking, [Shyness] should be read by anyone interested in stopping the rot in the discussion of human emotion and thought."—Helene Guldberg, Spiked Review of Books

— Helene Guldberg

Los Angeles Times

"Christopher Lane . . . 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.''"—Melissa Healy, Los Angeles Times

— Melissa Healy

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"Lane "charges that the task force, dominated by neuropsychiatrists, often used bad science or no science at all, that it turned ordinary human emotions into diseases and that it created a climate in which pharmaceutical companies could get rich creating cures for often nonexistent complexes."—Richard Hicks, Atlanta Journal-Constitution (op-ed)

— Richard Hicks

Chicago Tribune

"A provocative look at an important chapter in the history of modern psychiatry."—Judith Graham, Chicago Tribune

— Judith Graham

Scientific American

"Would Henry David Thoreau and Emily Dickinson be given drugs today? In the1980s a small group of leading psychiatrists revised the profession’s diagnostic manual called the DSM for short, adding social anxiety disorder—aka shyness—and dozens of other new conditions. Christopher Lane . . . uses previously secret documents, many from the American Psychiatric Association archives, to support his argument that these decisions were marked by carelessness, pervasive influence from the pharmaceutical industry, academic politics, and personal ambition."—Scientific American

British Medical Association

Highly commended for the 2008 Medical Book Award in the category of Mental Health, sponsored by the British Medical Association.

— Medical Book Award

Wall Street Journal

"Lane . . . 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. . . . [Shyness] provides vivid portraits of how DSM-III was constructed, over the course of six years."—Paul McHugh, Wall Street Journal

— Paul McHugh

Windy City Times

"[A] stunning and revelatory book. . . . For a book that''s about the invention of a medical condition, Shyness is as riveting as a detective story. Lane writes elegantly and passionately about the need to maintain our consciousness about the maddeningly rich complexity of human emotion and thought."—Yasmin Nair, Windy City Times

— Yasmin Nair

Metapsychology

"There is a great deal that''s interesting in this book. . . . I recommend this book as a thought-provoking and informative read."—John D. Mullen, Metapsychology

— John D. Mullen

BBC Focus

"Overall, Lane''s scholarly account of this saga ensures that if you''re not already concerned about the over-medicalization of our mental lives, you will be."—Christian Jarrett, BBC Focus

— Christian Jarrett

San Francisco Examiner

"As Lane’s research reveals, the cost of blaming anxieties on brain chemistry imbalance goes beyond dollars, to drug dependency, debilitating side effects and consumers convinced they’re hamstrung by their physiology."—Robin Tierney, San Francisco Examiner

— Robin Tierney

Choice

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title from 2008.

— Outstanding Academic Title

Lynne F. Maxwell - Library Journal

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 Prisonand 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.