Christopher Lane, Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness.(Book review)

Christopher Lane, Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007, 263 pp. $US 27.50 hardcover (978-0-300-12446-0)

In Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness, literary scholar Christopher Lane seeks to convince us that (North?) Americans are overdiagnosed and overmedicated. Is he successful? For the most part, he is.

Focusing on the evolution of shyness into "social phobia," an official category in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), Lane demonstrates that "shyness isn't just shyness anymore. It's a disease" (p. 1). He lays the blame for the rampant pathologizing of this and many other everyday human traits squarely at the feet of neuropsychiatry and Big Pharma, active collaborators in the exponential manufacture and classification of mental disease categories for the past several decades.

Lane has an axe to grind especially where …