Recent television adverts for drugs to treat social anxiety disorder have provided a talking point for the Deadline USA staff - along the lines of whether they unnecessarily encourage viewers to see symptoms such as palpitations and a dry mouth when confronted with a social situation as something that can be treated with pharmaceuticals (aside from the obvious ones).
The debate is also in full flow in the letters page of the New York Times, largely to criticise an opinion piece expressing bafflement "ordinary shyness could assume the dimension of a mental disease".
You can hear sufferers speak for themselves in a series of YouTube videos relating the reality of social anxiety. How, you may ask, does that work? If any one can explain how uploading frank videos available to anyone with an internet connection can co-exist with a fear of social situations, I'd be interested to hear.
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