Social Anxiety
For millions of Americans, every day is a struggle with debilitating shyness
It is something of a miracle that Grace Dailey is sitting in a restaurant in a coastal New Jersey town having an ordinary lunch, at ease with her world. Her careful, tiny bites of a tuna sandwich may seem unremarkable, but they are in fact a milestone. Back in her grade school cafeteria, she could only sip a bit to drink each day, unable to eat while she imagined her classmates' eyes boring into her. (Her high school teachers mistook her anxiety about eating for anorexia.) Only in her 20s, when panic attacks began to hit, did Dailey learn about the condition called social anxiety disorder, also known as "social phobia." But de spite some success with behavioral therapy and anxiety-reducing medication, the 32-year-old still struggles. "I would be a different person in a different place if I didn't have to deal with this on a daily basis," she says, frustration apparent in her furrowed brow.
Shyness is a nearly universal human trait. Most everyone has bouts of it, and half of those surveyed describe themselves as shy. Perhaps be cause it's so widespread, and because it suggests vulnerability, shyness is often an endearing trait: Princess Diana, for example, won millions of admirers with her "Shy Di" manner. The human species might not even exist if not for an instinctive wariness of other creatures. In fact, the ability to sense a threat and a desire to flee are lodged in the most primitive regions of the brain.
But at some life juncture, roughly 1 out of every 8 people becomes so timid that encounters with others turn into a source of over whelming dread. The heart races, palms sweat, mouth goes dry, words vanish, thoughts become cluttered, and an urge to escape takes over. This is the face of social phobia, the third most common mental disorder in the United States, be hind depression and alcoholism. Like Woody Allen in the film Annie Hall, some social phobics can barely utter a sentence without obsessing over the impression they are making. Others refuse to use public restrooms or talk on the telephone. Sometimes they go mute in front of the boss or a member of the opposite sex. At the extreme, they build a hermitic life, avoiding con tact with others (think of young Laura in Tennessee Williams's Glass Menagerie or the ghostly Boo in To Kill a Mockingbird).
Though social anxiety's symptoms have been noted since the time of Hippocrates, the disorder was a nameless affliction until the late 1960s and didn't make its way into psychiatry manuals until 1980. As it became better known, patients previously thought to suffer panic disorder were recognized as being anxious only in social set tings. A decade ago, 40 percent of people said they were shy, but in today's "nation of strangers"--in which computers and ATMs make face-to-face relations less and less common--that number is nearing 50 percent. Some psychologists are convinced that the Internet culture, often favored by those who fear human interaction, greases the slope from shyness down to social anxiety. "If people were slightly shy to begin with, they can now interact less and less," says Lynne Henderson, a Stanford University researcher and director of the Shyness Clinic in Menlo Park, Calif. "And that will make the shy ness much worse."
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