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Christopher Lane - Shyness, Häftad

Häftad, Engelska, 2008

Shyness

How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness

Av Christopher Lane

231 kr

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Beskrivning
How a handful of psychiatrists, with the help of the pharmaceutical industry, turned the ordinary emotion of shyness into an illnessIn the 1970s, a small group of leading psychiatrists met behind closed doors and literally rewrote the book on their profession. Revising and greatly expanding the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM for short), they turned what had been a thin, spiral-bound handbook into a hefty tome. Almost overnight the number of diagnoses exploded. The result was a windfall for the pharmaceutical industry and a massive conflict of interest for psychiatry at large. This spellbinding book is the first behind-the-scenes account of what really happened and why.With unprecedented access to the American Psychiatric Association archives and previously classified memos from drug company executives, Christopher Lane unearths the disturbing truth: with little scientific justification and sometimes hilariously improbable rationales, hundreds of conditions—among them shyness—are now defined as psychiatric disorders and considered treatable with drugs. Lane shows how long-standing disagreements within the profession set the stage for these changes, and he assesses who has gained and what’s been lost in the process of medicalizing emotions. With dry wit, he demolishes the façade of objective research behind which the revolution in psychiatry has hidden. He finds a profession riddled with backbiting and jockeying, and even more troubling, a profession increasingly beholden to its corporate sponsors.
Produktinformation
  • Utgivningsdatum: 2008-11-01
  • Mått: 156 x 235 x 19 mm
  • Vikt: 363 g
  • Format: Häftad
  • Språk: Engelska
  • Antal sidor: 272
  • Förlag: Yale University Press
  • ISBN: 9780300143171
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Mer om författaren

Christopher Lane is the Pearce Miller Research Professor, Northwestern University, and the recent recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship to study psychopharmacology and ethics.

Recensioner i media

“A scathing indictment of the American Psychiatric Association and the psychopharmacological industry . . . showing the growing influence of drug companies on 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.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)“Would Henry David Thoreau and Emily Dickinson be given drugs today? In the 1980s a small group of leading psychiatrists revised the profession’s diagnostic manual called the DSM (for short), adding social anxiety disorder—aka shyness—and dozens of other new conditions. Christopher Lane . . . uses previously secret documents, many from the American Psychiatric Association archives, to support his argument that these decisions were marked by carelessness, pervasive influence from the pharmaceutical industry, academic politics, and personal ambition.”—Scientific American“Lane . . . notes that when psychiatrists diagnose the shy as suffering from social phobia, they mistake a variation in human temperament for a mental disorder; if anything, the diagnosis only adds to the sense of unease felt by shy people. He is also right in observing that the psychiatrists’ Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), the profession’s standard 900-page reference work, errs by designating other kinds of normal human variation as mental disorders and so exaggerates the incidence of mental illness. . . . [Shyness] provides vivid portraits of how DSM-III was constructed, over the course of six years.”—Paul McHugh, Wall Street Journal“Lane argues in this well-researched . . . controversial book that shyness [has been] pathologized, to the detriment, especially, of children and teenagers.”—New York Times Book Review“[A] fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the making of the bible of modern psychiatry [that] explains how a once-ordinary affliction became a profitable disease.”—Michael Agger, Mother JonesA 2007 Top Seller in Psychology as compiled by YBP Library ServicesA 2007 Top Seller in Medicine as compiled by YBP Library ServicesA Best Book of the Year, Association of American University Presses, 2008Highly commended for the 2008 Medical Book Award in the category of Mental Health, sponsored by the British Medical AssociationWinner of the Prescrire Prize for Medical Writing, 2010"This is not only an important account of the creation of a modern disease and its treatment, it is an explosive indictment of a system that is too simply materialist in both philosophy and behavior."—Harold J. Cook, Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL"A marvelous book: disturbing and perturbing, a book that will be widely talked about and debated. It is extraordinarily well written, balanced, witty, and engrossing. Bravo!"—Arthur Kleinman, Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor and Chair of Anthropology, Professor of Medical Anthropology, and Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard University“Christopher Lane outlines an apparatus that is one of the most powerful cultural forces in the world today. In pulling back the drapes and revealing the bumbling and hamfistedness of the new engineers of human souls, Chris Lane might help restore sanity to Oz.”—David Healy, M.D., author of Let Them Eat Prozac and The Antidepressant Era“Written with Chris Lane’s brand of verve and scholarship, Shyness is a riveting book about how certain so-called illnesses are complex cultural artifacts and certain so-called doctors are casting spells called diagnoses. A smart and bracing book about shyness—not to mention a shrewd and subtle book about psychiatric classification—is long overdue; after reading Shyness it is clear that only Lane could have written it.”—Adam Phillips, psychoanalyst, author of Side-Effects

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