Clearly in need of medication
How Shyness Became a Mental Illness
What’s wrong with being shy, and just when and how did bashfulness and other ordinary human behaviors in children and adults become psychiatric disorders treatable with powerful, potentially dangerous drugs, asks a Northwestern University scholar in a new book that already is creating waves in the mental health community.
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“The number of mental disorders that children and adults in the general population might exhibit leaped from 180 in 1968 to more than 350 in 1994,” notes Lane, Northwestern’s Herman and Beulah Pearce Miller Research Professor. In a book that calls in doubt the facade of objective research behind psychiatry’s revolution, Lane questions the rationale for the changes, and whether all of them were necessary and suitably precise.By labeling shyness and other human traits as dysfunctions with a biological cause, the doors were opened wide to a pharmaceutical industry ready to provide a pill for every alleged chemical imbalance or biological problem, he adds.
“It might be funny,” he says, save for the fact that the DSM’s next edition, due to be completed in 2012, is likely to establish new categories for apathy, compulsive buying, Internet addiction, binge-eating and compulsive sexual behavior. Don’t look for road rage, however. It’s already in the DSM, under intermittent explosive disorder.
OK. Show of hands. Who doesn’t have a mental illness and need expensive meds? No one? You in the back, you don’t… No, I said mental, not metal. Wait. On second thought, we can treat that.
Self-confidence should be built upon children while they are young. I think that’s the best time that self-confidence should be developed. Because as a person grows, it becomes more of a problem. Let children go out and interact with other kids or people, let them enjoy their childhood and parents should just be there to guide them.
Takahashi, thank you for your comments. May I suggest you check out the website for the Citizen’s Commission on Human Rights. You’ll find other like-minded individuals there who share your beliefs and feelings.
MMany I speak to are gradually becoming aware that behaviour that was just a natural part of ‘growing up’ in my generation was given the time and ‘naturally’ appropriate (as in that was just what one did) treatment by parents and the extended family and friends.
Nowadays, the same behaviour is an inconvenience and no one wants to spend the little time it requires to be dealt with.
The modern solution is to label inconvenient behaviour a disorder. Then it becomes someone else’s problem.
The problem is that “someone else’s” have, is that there are so few of them and they only know how to give the most time efficient remedy.
A little green, red, blue pill.
The solution is to remove the labels that call these behaviours odd and encourage everyone to give the one thing that children and adults have always wanted.
Not pills, not the latest computer game or any other type of trinket…
Just quality time with those they love and respect and who love and cherish them too