(public speaking) Shy? Or Something More Serious? (Washington Post)

All that changed in February 1980, when the APA classified the broadly defined "avoidant personality disorder" and "social phobia" (later dubbed "social anxiety disorder") as diseases. As a result of statistics like these and the disease criteria listed in the updated Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, large numbers of people swallow daily doses of Paxil , Prozac and Zoloft for conditions that many experts now consider medical problems stemming from a chemical imbalance. But did substituting social anxiety disorder for anxiety neurosis blur an important distinction between ordinary shyness and that kind of paralyzing distress? With the inclusion of more and more behaviors — public-speaking anxiety, concern about dealing with people in authority, even dating anxiety — the diagnostic category ballooned until it overlapped with common shyness, as several key studies suggested, including a 1990 article in Behaviour Research and Therapy by University of Pittsburgh psychiatrist Samuel M. In the 1990 article, Turner and his colleagues wrote, "Interestingly, the central elements of social phobia, that is discomfort and anxiety in social situations and the associated behavioral responses . The piece drew from a single study — a random telephone survey of 526 urban Canadians — with results suggesting that social anxiety among them ranged from 1. read more

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