The medicalisation of shyness: from social misfits to social fitness

The medicalisation of shyness: from social misfits to social fitness.

Shyness has become an 'unhealthy' state of mind for individuals living in contemporary Western societies. Insofar as its behavioural 'symptoms' imply a failure to achieve certain cultural values, such as assertiveness, self-expression and loquacious vocality, shyness is increasingly defined as a problem for which people can, and should, be treated. This paper first critically discusses the idea...

Differentiating social phobia from shyness.

To clarify the relationship between social phobia and shyness, this study examined the characteristics of highly shy persons with social phobia, highly shy persons without social phobia, and non-shy persons. Those with social phobia reported more symptomatology, more functional impairment, and a lower quality of life than those without social phobia. About one-third of the highly shy without so...

Shyness, Social Anxiety, and Social Phobia

from linguistics to literature: a linguistic approach to the study of linguistic deviations in the turkish divan of shahriar

chapter i provides an overview of structural linguistics and touches upon the saussurean dichotomies with the final goal of exploring their relevance to the stylistic studies of literature. to provide evidence for the singificance of the study, chapter ii deals with the controversial issue of linguistics and literature, and presents opposing views which, at the same time, have been central to t...

On the Social Construction of Overdiagnosis; Comment on “Medicalisation and Overdiagnosis: What Society Does to Medicine”

In an interesting article Wieteke van Dijk and colleagues argue that societal developments and values influence the practice of medicine, and thus can result in both medicalisation and overdiagnosis. They provide a convincing argument that overdiagnosis emerges in a social context and that it has socially constructed implications. However, they fail to show that overdiagnosis per se is socially...