“A scathing indictment of the American Psychiatric Association and the psychopharmacological industry . . . showing the growing influence of drug companies on showing the growing influence of drug companies on psychiatry practice. Similarly alarming are Lane's dissections of big pharma’s marketing of anti-depressants and description of how information about side-effects and withdrawal symptoms associated with popular prescription drugs such as Prozac and Paxil were withheld from the public.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)“Would Henry David Thoreau and Emily Dickinson be given drugs today? In the 1980s 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“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“Lane argues in this well-researched . . . controversial book that shyness [has been] pathologized, to the detriment, especially, of children and teenagers.”—New York Times Book Review“[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“Excellent. . . . A welcome contribution to psychiatric discourse.”—New York Observer“Lane provides a behind-the-scenes look at the haphazard, unscientific process used to revise The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. . . . [A] superb, iconoclastic cultural study.”—Library Journal“Brilliant. . . . 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.”—New Statesman and Society“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 [and] tells the complex story with impressive clarity.”—Jerome Burne, Times Literary Supplement“Splendid. . . . Lane gives a compelling description of how shyness—once seen as a normal variation of character or personality—became incorporated into the DSM as social phobia or avoidant personality disorder.”—The LancetA 2007 Top Seller in Psychology as compiled by YBP Library ServicesA 2007 Top Seller in Medicine as compiled by YBP Library ServicesA Best Book of the Year, Association of American University Presses, 2008Highly commended for the 2008 Medical Book Award in the category of Mental Health, sponsored by the British Medical AssociationWinner of the Prescrire Prize for Medical Writing, 2010"This is not only an important account of the creation of a modern disease and its treatment, it is an explosive indictment of a system that is too simply materialist in both philosophy and behavior."—Harold J. Cook, Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL"A marvelous book: disturbing and perturbing, a book that will be widely talked about and debated. It is extraordinarily well written, balanced, witty, and engrossing. Bravo!"—Arthur Kleinman, Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor and Chair of Anthropology, Professor of Medical Anthropology, and Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard University“Christopher Lane outlines an apparatus that is one of the most powerful cultural forces in the world today. In pulling back the drapes and revealing the bumbling and hamfistedness of the new engineers of human souls, Chris Lane might help restore sanity to Oz.”—David Healy, M.D., author of Let Them Eat Prozac and The Antidepressant Era“Written with Chris Lane’s brand of verve and scholarship, Shyness is a riveting book about how certain so-called illnesses are complex cultural artifacts and certain so-called doctors are casting spells called diagnoses. A smart and bracing book about shyness—not to mention a shrewd and subtle book about psychiatric classification—is long overdue; after reading Shyness it is clear that only Lane could have written it.”—Adam Phillips, psychoanalyst, author of Side-Effects
