Side Effects

From quirky to serious, trends in psychology and psychiatry.

Christopher Lane is the Pearce Miller Research Professor of Literature at Northwestern University and the author of Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness. See full bio

April 5, 2009

Being Happy-Go-Lucky

It's rare these days to see a film that deliberately rejects edginess and irony, but that's what British director Mike Leigh seems to have wanted—and accomplished—in Happy-Go-Lucky, which recently released on DVD. Read More

April 3, 2009

Why is ADHD such a common diagnosis among boys?

The sentence that proved most controversial in my book Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness was a line I quoted from a psychoanalyst. "We used to have a word for sufferers of ADHD," he lamented to me. "We called them boys."

What this man was signaling was a troubling, quite noticeable, gap in prevalence rates between young men and women—a gap that caused him concern.

His statement made me wonder: Why are so many boys and young men being treated for this illness in particular? Read More

March 30, 2009

The Latest Personality Disorder?

My weekend reading included two fascinating, completely different articles on celebrity egos. One marveled at the outsized political ambitions of several mediocre actors and asked why, as entertainers, they no longer seem to know "their place." The other, less cutting but no less devastating, concluded that such celebrities have a personality disorder we should be taking very seriously. Hollywood in this respect is but the tip of a massive iceberg. Read More

March 26, 2009

A Quiz for Drug Companies

When online quizzes are not as private as we expect. Read More

March 25, 2009

Should overuse of the Internet become a mental disorder?

The next time your son begs to continue playing Nintendo Wii over dinner, your daughter texts her friends for the umpteenth time that day, or you find yourself lost online, madly pursuing links to new websites, consider this: American psychiatrists are busy debating whether such activities should soon be known as "Internet addiction." Read More

Books by Christopher Lane, Ph.D.

Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness

Hatred and Civility: The Antisocial Life in Victorian England

Anxiety Basics

From normal butterflies-in-the-stomach to clinically diagnosable conditions such as Panic Disorder, anxiety motivates some people but paralyzes others.

Go to the Anxiety Basics page for more on Anxiety including: