Diagnosis: Disordered: The Medicalization of Society: On the Transformation of Human Conditions into Treatable Disorders Peter Conrad  Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD, 2007,  224 pp., cloth $40.00; ppk $20.00, ISBN: 978-0801885846; ISBN: 978-0801885853 The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield  Oxford University Press, New York, 2007,  312 pp., cloth, $31.95, ISBN: 978-0195313048 Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness Christopher Lane  Yale University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2007,  272 pp., cloth $27.50; ppk. $18.00, ISBN: 978-0300124460; ISBN: 978-0300143171

The Medicalization of Society, The Loss of Sadness, and Shyness mark a shift in the way contemporary Western culture determines which human behaviors are considered disorders. With growing concern, the authors trace the way behaviors previously characterized as “normal” (like shyness) are increasingly diagnosed as disorders; and they investigate with equal concern the degree to which medications, including powerful psychotropic drugs, are prescribed to treat these disorders. While definitions of “normal” are dependent on particular historical and cultural contexts, the authors of the titles reviewed here note the disappearance of the idea of “normal” human emotions (like sorrow), behaviors (like shyness), and physical attributes (like baldness or short stature). Collectively, the authors invoke a future in which the range of acceptable human emotions is so narrow that disordered (and therefore medicalized) is the new “normal.” Although the authors are careful to acknowledge that the lives of those suffering from Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) and Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD), for example, are often improved immeasurably by diagnosis and treatment, the authors also wonder what risks attend the expanding definition of “disordered.” What does the expansion of the label “disordered” tell us about contemporary culture, its defenses, its resistances, and its own disorder(s)?

By Peter Conrad (Harry Coplan Professor of Social Sciences at Brandeis University), The Medicalization of Society has the largest scope of the titles under consideration. Conrad does not limit his focus to the history of a particular disorder but instead addresses four case studies, which, when taken together, mark an expanding use of medicine to treat a variety of human conditions, “problems” that even two decades ago would not have been deemed appropriate for medication. With new treatments for male andropause, baldness, and erectile dysfunction, adult ADHD, and short stature, Conrad wonders where