The Book of Phobias and Manias Quotes

“In "Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness" (2007) Christopher Lane describes how pharmaceutical companies helped to persuade the American Psychiatric Association to include social phobia in the "DSM" of 1980. He argues that the diagnosis in many cases turned a personality trait into an illness, pathologising people who were resvered, private or quiet. 'Over the course of six years,' he writes, 'a small group of self-selecting American psychiatrists built a sweeping new consensus: shyness and a host of comparable traits were anxiety and personality disorders. And they stemmed not from psychological conflicts or social tensions, but rather from a chemical imbalance or faulty neurotransmitters in the brain.' Lane believes that there is a great cost to medicalising our quirks, eccentricities and ordinary feelings. "The sad consequence,' he says, 'is a vast, perhaps irrecoverable, loss of emotional range, an impovershment of human experience.”
― Kate Summerscale, The Book of Phobias and Manias: A History of Obsession