In the Boston Globe yesterday appeared an op-ed by a former colleague, Christopher Lane, an English prof at Northwestern. There, he cites a study just published in The Journal of Nuclear Medicine that claims to find a biological cause of social anxiety disorder.
That’s not the focus of the op-ed, though. Rather, it’s the identification of social anxiety disorder’s defining attribute: “fear of being evaluated by others, with the expectation that such an assessment will be negative and embarrassing.”
Lane highlights the obvious problem, namely, the “amazingly open-ended definition.” And he has a recommendation for the professionals:
“In preparation for its fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, due to appear in 2012, the American Psychiatric Association has begun to review its criteria. To restore public and professional confidence in the manual, the organization needs to raise, not lower, its diagnostic thresholds and delete every reference in the manual to mild or routine suffering, so that it’s possible once more to distinguish between the chronically ill and the worried well.”
We should carry that concern particular over to the academic profession, for if chronic fear of evaluation is a sign of social anxiety disorder, every professor might just as well sign up for treatment. Evaluation by others is the nature of the fields, and with so much often at stake in peer reviews, anxiety isn’t a pathological condition. It’s normal, and it helps keep scholarly labor scrupulous and collegial. If we start going with expert thinking, then we have to wonder whether academic judgment, especially in those fields where values and human interests reign, isn’t based upon a neurotic condition.
(Image from photobucket.com)
