Shyness could be defined as a mental illness

Shyness, bereavement and eccentric behavior could be classed as a mental illness under new guidelines, leaving millions of people at risk of being diagnosed as having a psychiatric disorder, experts fear.

Under changes planned to the diagnosis handbook used by doctors in the US, common behavioral traits are likely to be listed as a mental illness, it was reported.

The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of Mental Disorders could also include internet addiction and gambling as a medical problem. …

"We need to be very careful before further broadening the boundaries of illness and disorder," Simon Wessely, of the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London, told the Daily Mail. "Back in 1840, the census of the United States included just one category for mental disorder. "By 1917, the American Psychiatric Association recognized 59, rising to 128 in 1959, 227 in 1980, and 347 in the last revision. Do we really need all these labels? Probably not. And there is a real danger that shyness will become social phobia, bookish kids labeled as Asperger's and so on."

Peter Kinderman, head of the Institute of Psychology at the University of Liverpool, said it was not "humane" to describe shy or bereaved people as "mentally ill". …

There are fears the new classifications are being driven by drug companies seeking to profit from a greater number of illnesses while the private health care system in the States requires a diagnosis recognized by the manual for a patient to be treated as ill.

"DSM5 will radically and recklessly expand the boundaries of psychiatry. Many millions will receive inaccurate diagnosis and inappropriate treatment," said Allen Frances of Duke University, North Carolina.

Psychiatry is not a true science in that it is impossible to PROVE and REPEAT their conclusions with any reasonable level of certainty.

Your unscientific OPINION shows you have no clue what you're talking about.

The DSM was created to give specific criteria for mental disorders would be repeatable with a level of certainty. For example, major depressive disorder requires five out of nine be present for at least two weeks: depressed mood, sleep (insomnia or hypersomnia), appetite (best seen in weight changes), interest, energy, excessive feelings of guilt, concentration, psychomotor (agitation or retardation), and suicidal ideation. It is serious - they're at increased risk of suicide! The blossoming of the number of disorders has more to do with drawing distinctions between subsets, like bipolar disorder I and II, because the specific diagnoses can have different prognoses and treatments.

Psychiatry has to do with helping people have insight into their condition to help them do something about it, not to avoid taking responsibility for it.

Well snippy, I obviously know way more about the scientific method than you ever will.

In my world, unless I can replicate results 100% of the time there is no scientific certainty upon which anyone depend. You seem to be in the gloBULL Warming camp where you can adjust the criteria to fit the conclusion.

If the physco community is allowed to write their own low standards then they can claim certainty where none exists. How wonderful. Sort of how teachers avoid attempts to rate their performance.

If you had reading skills and not just false opinions you would have seen I acknowledge there were some valid conditions but the “lets make it a medical condition” crowd HAS corrupted this shakey science even further by giving people an excuse for bad behavior.

WANT PROOF and not just OPINION? If you will recall sometime, midsummer of 2011 the fake science community wanted to “Rename”, “Reclassify” various acts of pedophilia so as to REMOVE THE STIGMA from these acts. WELL HOT SHOT tell us all how this is not removing responsibility from ones actions! These charlatans are dangerous and their pseudo profession is in desperate need of oversight.

In my world, unless I can replicate results 100% of the time...

Yeah, that's nice, but you need to get out of your head and deal with the real world instead. Nothing in this world is 100% certain. You might like to think your happy little Newtonian physics is, but the reality is you haven't done enough repetitions yet under perfect conditions to account for the random decay of protons in your subject material and are totally ignoring the fact that scientists try to eliminate error while doing multiple tests under ultimately less than perfect conditions and calculate an average and standard deviation, because the world operates on bell curves.

It is unethical and illegal to subject human beings to 'perfect conditions' for the sake of controlling all possible variables in research. People are far less predictable than "scientific" conditions. Apparently, the psychiatric community, among others, with its ethical review boards still has higher standards than you.

The psychiatric and medical communities don't claim certainty where none exists, at least not the way you do. In medicine you learn to deal with chance and risk. If someone has this minimum blood pressure, what is their risk of dying from heart disease? And, unfortunately, in obstetrics, if the doctor doesn't run an expensive test for this condition that the patient has a 0.01% change of having, and they end up having it, what is their risk of being sued?

If someone is shy, what is his risk of having an adverse social outcome? Is there a level of shyness at which the risk of having a poor outcome becomes significant? What criteria would meet that and what is the chance of a false positive or negative? What are the risks involved in diagnosing or treating someone for their shyness? Do the benefits of treatment outweigh the risks? Those are the kinds of questions scientists would be dealing with in researching shyness. You might not agree with them, but they're still a lot more serious than you think.

Shyness does not even show up in the DSM-V. The only hit on that site is a comment from 2005 that more research is needed to define the line between normal shyness and social anxiety disorder.

Proof? Your point about renaming/reclassifying pedophilia is absurd. In spite of hysterical blog posts from 2011 that copy and paste each other, at the professional level that discussion appears to have gone from one symposia at the 2003 annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association (out of 104, so who knows what the attendence was) arguing that it shouldn't be a disorder, to a 2011 conference by an independent group, which boasted of 9 speakers and 38 attendees, that wanted it renamed "minor-attraction." They're marginalized. So, what renaming or reclassifying will the psychiatrists actually do? In the proposed DSM-V, "pedophilia" no longer requires someone to have acted on or felt impaired by the urges, and the renamed "pedophilia disorder" is the diagnosed act/impaired condition that they treat. Damn, man, talk about removing a stigma... Please, do some research, or address your own desperate need of oversight.

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