Hey, it's new to me
This book by Christopher Lane,
Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness was published by Yale University Press in 2008.
Amazon link which I used to write this thread.
I have a Scribd account, but this review seems to be readable, even if you don't have a membership.
Review by Simon Wessely.
In essence:
Quote:
Treat someone for shyness, and the insurance companies will laugh at you. Treat someone with social phobia, with its DSM seal of approval as disorder 300-23, and the bill will be paid.
|
This is pertinent to our interests as another example of how the distortions in our health care wind up hurting instead of helping. By medicalizing a completely normal variation in the human being, we have people taking drugs who don't need anything but understanding.
For people who do have a real mental illness which adversely affects their life, we have people taking drugs who would be better served by a change in diet.
Before you know it, this common condition; which I had in abundance until adulthood; is a crisis of public health and must be treated.
This is similar to how introversion has become weaponized as a "disorder." In
APA Does Not Care about Weaponized Diagnosis, Dr Paula A Caplan relates:
Quote:
Jenny is one of nine people who filed groundbreaking complaints last summer with the ethics department of the American Psychiatric Association, the powerful and totally unregulated lobby group that publishes the "Bible" of psychiatric diagnosis and reaps the more than $100-million profit its current edition has earned. That manual has made Jenny's life a living hell, as it did for the other complaints (sometimes colloquially called "The DSM 9"). And the APA has just summarily dismissed all nine complaints without regard to their merits, that is, without showing the slightest concern about the suffering it has caused. The array of kinds of harm done to the complainants because of being diagnosed as mentally ill is chilling.
|
I am extremely concerned about how the Corporatization of the world goes hand in hand with authoritarian regimes. Tyranny is good for profits, after all.
Since the rise of consumer culture, it's been a given that artificial problems demand artificial solutions. Now it's gone up a notch: it's actually taking human traits and deciding they aren't, after all, "normal." Buy this stuff to make it happen.
If this is science fiction: we're living in it now.