CHICAGO — People who struggle against social convention fascinate Christopher Lane, a Northwestern University professor of English. In his new book, “Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness,” Lane looks at people who don’t conform to our culture’s fondness for sociability. It’s a provocative look at an important chapter in the history of modern psychiatry.
Lane recently talked about the book.
Q: Were you shy as a kid? Did you have personal experiences that planted the seed for this book?
A: I was. I was quite shy as an adolescent.
Frankly, though, I thought more about my mom’s experience. As a child in London during the war (World War II), with the city under attack, she was very frightened and very shy. Around strangers, she’d pretend to be a horse and gallop on all fours.
What’s interesting is how my grandparents decided to handle it. Which was to say ‘there is something unusually creative about this child. She’s blessed with a vivid imagination. Let’s give her time.’
This quirky child stands for a certain kind of spontaneous, unmedicated childhood. It’s possible in today’s world that behavior would be looked at very differently. And that worries me.
Q:How was shyness seen, historically, before the modern era? Was it a negative character trait? A positive trait?
A: The word “shy” was applied to humans for the first time in the 17th century. Before that time, the concept was used to refer to animals, particularly horses that were skittish.
Through most of the 19th century, shyness was interpreted as a virtue. It signified that a person was reflective and introspective.
And that was seen as a plus.
Interestingly, (Charles) Darwin was fascinated by shyness because he couldn’t understand what its evolutionary purpose was. Why would people blush? Why would they feel ashamed or embarrassed?
Q: So when did shyness become something to be concerned about?
A: I would say that began in 1980 with the publication of the DSM III (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, third edition, published by the American Psychiatric Association).
That’s where you find the worries many people have — fear of speaking in public, of eating alone in restaurants, of giving presentations at work — listed as indications of potential mental disorders. Specifically, social phobia and avoidant personality disorder.
That’s really disconcerting because shyness becomes almost indistinguishable from these disorders. By the 1990s you see social anxiety disorder named as the “disorder of the decade” in Psychology Today.
Q: You find this disturbing?
A: There are people who are very anxious about being with people. People who can’t leave the house because they’re chronically impaired.
But the DSM made it difficult to distinguish between that small group of chronically impaired people and people who have run-of-the-mill anxieties.
Q: What’s in it for the psychiatrists?
A: I would say as a whole I think psychiatrists feel that it is their responsibility to eliminate suffering and that their consensus right now is that medication is the most efficient and pain-free way of doing that.
For me, the profession has lost some of its direction. It became so enamored of psycho- pharmacology that it failed to see what it was giving up in the process: a much more nuanced and rich examination of the mind.
Q: The diagnosis “social anxiety disorder” opened up a huge new market for drug companies marketing SSRIs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. What happened?
A: Basically, as soon as SmithKline Beecham (now GlaxoSmithKline) got FDA approval to sell Paxil as a treatment for social anxiety disorder . . . they ran a very expensive public awareness campaign.
