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Are You Shy? Maybe You Have a Mental Illness...
We live in a culture where everyone seems to want to blame someone or something else for their behavior. And we live in a world where if people are the least bit different from the main stream are suddenly being handing diagnoses of this or that mental illness. The number of mental disorders the general population might exhibit leaped from 180 in 1968 to more than 350 in 1994. So in 30 years, did we become twice as likely to have a mental illness or do the doctors just have too much time on the hands?
Are we more attentive and figuring out more about what is wrong with us or are we trying harder than ever to make sense of our world by putting people into little boxes? Is it too much of a challenge to deal with a child who is fidgety, so instead we give them a label and medicate them so that overstretched personnel have one less thing to worry about? Instead of taking responsibility for our lives and our own feelings, has it become easier to look for past wrongs that have turned us into shy or depressed individuals?
Don't get me wrong, I know there are people in the world who have bad things happen to them and they need counseling or medication to help them deal with it. There are people who have chemical imbalances and there are children who truly have ADHD. I just wanted to throw out some food for thought. Part of what got me thinking about this was an article my hubby sent me.
From the Article:
In "Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness" (Yale University Press, October 2007), Northwestern's Christopher Lane chronicles the "highly unscientific and often arbitrary way" in which widespread revisions were made to "The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" (DSM), a publication known as the bible of psychiatry that is consulted daily by insurance companies, courts, prisons and schools as well as by physicians and mental health workers.
In examining the American Psychiatric Association archives, Lane -- who argues that psychiatry is using drugs with poor track records to treat growing numbers of normal human emotions -- even came across a proposal to establish "chronic complaint disorder," in which people moan about the weather, taxes or the previous night's racetrack results.
"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.
I don't know that there is much we can do about this trend as your average citizen on the street...but it is something to keep in mind if you, your children, or a friend suddenly has a doctor questioning whether or not you are too shy, too apathetic or on the Internet too much! Stand up and be proud of your differences and tell your physician that he should get some therapy as he obviously has a problem with misdiagnosing his patients!
Hat Tip: Physorg.com
