Joe Moran— Unlike Scandinavians or Southeast Asians, Americans have no carefully calibrated language for describing different kinds of embarrassment. They have a reputation for seeing shyness as unAmerican. Their cultural heroes are seemingly self-sufficient, outdoorsy types: pioneers, backwoodsmen, cowboys, baseball players—men living what Theodore Roosevelt called “the strenuous life.” But
Joe Moran— I have been shy for as long as I can remember. For half of my life it just seemed an inconvenience, something to live with rather than be curious about. I became interested in shyness as a subject—one that might repay careful reflection—when I began to find my
In 2013 a new edition of the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) will be published, and the American Psychiatric Association has already begun to prepare it. A number of mental health professionals are warning that the expanded diagnoses are leading to a world in which almost no
Christopher Lane, author of Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness, wrote an op-ed for the November 6 edition of the Washington Post. The piece, titled “Shy? Or Something More Serious?,” has generated strong responses online. Here is an excerpt from “Shy? Or Something More Serious?”: If anyone in my