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.
[…]
“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.
Maybe we can get some comments from TOM CRUISE on this thread? Sounds like he and The Scholar are singing from the same hymnal. Was L. Ron Hubbard right?
ANY belief is mental. Thank about that one. I mean THINK about that one. L Ron Hubbard used to say that the ultimate goal of ANY religion is to be– in what scientology calls– in the “clear”. That state is a state of mental clearness. A state of no thought. For example, there are people who believe the world is evil. Well, keeping that thread of belief in their heads they will distort reality to fit into an “evil world”. Yet, they look healthy from the outside. But the mental world they have created causes them great grief.
I am proof of mental clearness. Look at my smile! All of you need medication. But mostly, maybe, you just need blowjobs. hahaha [I’m jumping up and down on my couch with Siri].
P.S. I AM NOT GAY!
they wont stop until there are enough categories to ensure everyone gets at least one pill a day
p.s. come out of the closet Tom
I used to be shy. Then my friends got me on a neat drug call, “alcohol,” specically, “Tequila.” I am not sure if that name is trademarked so I hope I am not sued for using it.
Anyway, after one dose, I was one with the universe. After two doses, I was God’s gift to women. After three doses, I was nine foot tall, bullet-proof, and out to prove it.
The side effects were horrible but didn’t usually kick in until the next morning.
That stuff cures shyness like no one’s business!
What’s wrong with self-medicating with beer?
I’m addicted to DU. Is that a mental illness and is there a pill for it? What would be it’s medical term?
#4 – Sorry – my morning medication of “coffee in mass quantities” hasn’t kicked in yet.
I’ve had a layman’s fascination with mental illness every since my best friend in college sunk into full blown schizophrenia.
My personal belief about mental illness, then, has proven true for me in the many cases I’ve seen since: mental illness is mostly out-of-whack normal human experience.
So, shyness COULD become a mental illness if experienced in the extreme. Agoraphobia comes to mind.
The problem with diagnosing kids with mental illness is that it’s normal for kids to have abnormal forms of emotions and behavior (compared to an adult.)
Think of a child in a mall dancing obliviously to music in their head? That’s cute, right? But when an adult does it, it’s crazy.
Surely, the same goes for the way-too-many ADD or ADHD diagnosis in kids. Isn’t a 15 second attention span and hyper activity NORMAL in kids?
I think I might have been diagnosed as ADD as a child but I’m pretty normal now — maybe a little more distractable than typical.
That’s why I’m here on DU instead of reading the news like I intended!
These are the same people that turned “being a little asshole” into “ADHD”.
A halfway decent parent can help their kid overcome shyness (or being a little asshole). Why admit little Brandon or Brittany is anything less than perfect when you can just throw pills down their throat and say they are “suffering” from an “illness”?
I was at the playground the other day where a young girl, perhaps 7 or 8 years old, yells out to her mom from the jungle gym, “mom, can I take off my coat?”. Her mother’s response, “NO!”.
See where children become shy? The girl was overheating in her coat but she had to ask her mother if she could take it off. The child’s decision-making and reaction to the elements is outsourced to her mother. That child is going to grow up shy because she can’t believe herself. She has no confidence to act on her own feelings because her ability to think on her own was taken away from her.
This is so unreal.When they labor behavior a disease, they are asking to take away our right. Once you become a patience, you lose your right to take care of yourself. This also another way to promote drug that might not work at all for the disease.You know follow the money.
I believe in something natural which is a threat to a drug cartel.
No one can serve both God and money. I serve God.
Medicine by democracy! Yeah, that’s the ticket!
We already know that there are more extroverts than there are introverts. Anywhere from two to one to three to one depending on who you listen to.
I already know I’m an introvert (my MBTI is INTP ffs!)
Just getting put down by the extroverts. Again.
Isn’t it the US gov’t that maintains that ‘loners” are terrorists in disguise, or at least some kind of problem that must be watched?
What disease do loners have?
#6
“I’m addicted to DU. Is that a mental illness and is there a pill for it? What would be it’s medical term?”
Lack of social life.
#10
“Why admit little Brandon or Brittany is anything less than perfect when you can just throw pills down their throat and say they are “suffering” from an “illness”?”
Because it’s the jobs of the farmaceutical corporations to make life easier to parents by simply drugging their children towards a sheep like trance so they won’t have to bother raising them.
#15: Blue balls.
Yeah, too bad you can’t see ADD until a person has died. Wait, you can’t see it then, either. Oh, and even if people couldn’t provide tests for cancer way back when, there were still physical symptoms.
As a psychologist turned antipsychiatry, I laugh at the industry. One day they’ll be illegal.
By the way, I’m a shy introvert.
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