Psychiatric Association To Call Shyness A Mental Illness

American Psychiatric Association makes an official manual which identifies different mental illnesses. This manual is called Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of mental Disorders (DSM). Its edition keeps changing as new illnesses come or get verified. Those who work with psychologically disturbed patients take help from DSM to study their mental illnesses. If needed, they let others in the medical industry such as the insurance companies to know about their findings about these patients. The one you are seeing in the picture is DSM-IV. Its time is expiring. The latest one coming out will be called as 5^th edition. There is controversy surrounding this one because it is on its way to declaring that shyness is a mental illness. If officially made public this manual is going to stir trouble for all shy Americans. 

Shyness is a very broad personality trait. No one is shy because of just one specific reason. Every person is different and shyness can be either situational or habitual. But what DSM is going to do is put every shy person in the same category.

Those who are against this new edition believe that taking shyness as mental illness will make many go through wrong diagnosis and medical treatment. It is also possible that the treatment will be forced upon a totally normal person. Yes, anything can happen because medical industry loves the idea of making money. At the end of the day, the real mission of  a business is to make profit! 

It is predicted that acceptance of this DSM-V will also bring some hostile and even awkward social changes. Some examples we can conjure up right now on this are:

• Shy kids getting bullied in school.
• Both men and women getting forced to be more aggressive and open. Those who fail in such departments might get tagged as mentally sick patients.
• Shy people experiencing negative behavior from their colleagues and so on.

Good news is that effort has been made to stop this DSM-V from getting published. Even many working psychology profession are against it. At least 11,000 people signed a petition to show their opposition. Nothing is final yet. So all we can do now is hope that shyness does not make its way into the manual. This little personality trait is universal. In the US alone, we have 80 percent shy people and that is a combination of adults and teens. This basically tells us that the new edition of DSM manual will end up declaring that more than half of the US population is mentally sick. Those who live in foreign countries must also remain alert on this topic. Point to note is that elements from US culture go global.