What is new is that the mental health industry has figured out a way to make money off it, so now they are diagnosing it in far greater numbers. In the old days there was nothing they could do. They could only milk patients and their health insurers/govt. payers for so long. And no Carlos, CBT doesn’t work. 10 years of it got me nowhere.

http://www.psychology.sunysb.edu/eklonsky-/division12/treatments/socialphobia_cbt.html

bit.ly/N8Nmv

While all of these names for anxiety disorders are stupid, it does not invalidate the fact that some people cannot deal with anxiety-provoking situations in the same way as the general population. People with SAD very often develop other anxiety disorders which hopefully these ignorant medical professionals take a little more seriously (eg. OCD) due to there seemingly less ordinary nature. The ironic thing is that they all stem from the same problem.

Seriously, do any of you know what you are talking about?

Great work. Thanks for your viewpoint.

A simple question comes to mind. Does secondary
adrenal fatigue and social anxiety have
any linkage. Is it me or am I being simplistic
when I link social anxiety to lowered
cortisol, epinephrine and seritonin counts?
Is malabsorbtion a contributing factor.
Are bio-identical hormones and nutrients the actual cure for social anxiety?

That statement should be an alarming wake up call to parents everwhere. Scary, scary stuff.

There are indeed some really good examples of how the DSM is driven by political agenda rather than by science. One is (as was noted) the removal of homosexuality from the DSM in response to lobby group pressure. Another was the introduction of PTSD due to lobby group pressure from war vets. Another was the introduction of panic disorder as a disorder in its own right after the development of some drug for it (sorry but I forget which one).

Sometimes disorders are differentiated on the basis of finding a treatment for them. Neurosyphilis was carved off from Schizophrenia with the development of anti-biotics that worked for a subset of people with Schizophrenia (those with Neurosyphilis, basically). Since we have now discovered the spirochette that results in syphilis that is further support for the idea that it is a distict disorder from Schizophrenia, however.

Social phobia is indeed really controversial. Some people regard it to be ‘pathologising shyness’. It draws attention to the rather problematic boundary between ‘mentally disordered’ and ‘not mentally disordered’ and it is unclear what we should say about it. Of course people with social phobia suffer – but not ALL cases of suffering are mental disorders. To say that social phobia isn’t a mental disorder isn’t to undermine or invalidate the suffering of the people who have been diagnosed with it – it is just to say that it doesn’t constitute a kind of condition that should be in the DSM / ICD.

I’d just like to say… That it is controversial whether people with more traditionally ‘biological’ disorders should be so quick to jump to medications as a first port of call either. If you want to teach someone to cook you will have more luck with environmental interventions (teaching them how) than with psychosurgery or medication yet of course neurological changes are required in order to teach a person how to cook. Similarly, I’m sure nobody denies that social phobia has a neurological basis. The million dollar question is how we are best to treat the people who we currently diagnose as being socially anxious. And… Whether social phobia is a distinct disorder in its own right.

I also never meant to insinuate, if indeed you got that I did, that medications aren’t and couldn’t be extremely helpful. Only that the research clearly shows that non-medication treatments are also extremely helpful for this disorder.

As for the brain disorder theory of “chemical imbalance,” that’s been largely refuted in recent years. The research shows that mental disorders are far more complex than a simple or single neurochemical being “out of balance” in the brain.

Which isn’t to say that the brain isn’t implicated in some manner in this and other disorders. Just that what those roots are is still very much up in the air.