Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness

""Before you sell a drug, you have to sell the disease. And never was this truer than for social anxiety disorder,"" concludes English professor and Guggenheim fellow Lane in this scathing indictment of the American Psychiatric Association and the psychopharmacological industry. In 1980, a massive overhaul of the psychiatry bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, added a host of conditions (social phobia among them) to the roster of mental disorders, creating a boon for the pharmaceutical industry, which, in the decades since, has brought to market a cornucopia of drugs to combat an ever-increasing number of mental illnesses. Lane finds a trove of troubling (and previously unpublished) material in the APA archive and in drug company memorandums, laying bare the APA's internal politics (as fierce as academia) and showing the growing influence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. This controversial and well-documented book will spark its share of debates.