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Sedation nation the cost of taking boisterous out of boys

[deleted]

February 20, 2011

4 upvotes

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/sedation-nation-the-cost-of-taking-boisterous-out-of-boys-20110216-1awij.html?from=brisbanetimes_ft

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Post Information

Title	Sedation nation the cost of taking boisterous out of boys
Author	[deleted]
Upvotes	4
Comments	1
Date	February 20, 2011 1:43 AM UTC (15 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/forzh/sedation_nation_the_cost_of_taking_boisterous_out/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/sedation-nation-the-cost-of-taking-boisterous-out.1042934 https://theredarchive.com/post/1042934

Comments

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points3 points 15 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

When Christopher Lane, author of Shyness: How Normal Behaviour Became a Sickness, quoted a psychoanalyst saying "We used to have a word for sufferers of ADHD; we called them boys", he probably did not expect it to become the most famous line of his book.

Lane's point was more general, about how personality traits that were once tolerated and even celebrated are now treated as disorders.

What was once introversion is now "avoidant personality disorder", nervousness is "social anxiety disorder" (SAD) or dating anxiety disorder (DAD) and so on. It's not that these disorders don't exist, says Lane, a Guggenheim fellow studying the ethics of psychopharmacology, but that our definitions are so broad that the entire mysterious subconscious is reduced to chemical balance, and any deviation looks like disease.