Seminarios celebrados durante el Congreso
A/CONF.213/18 examinado denuncias de tortura y otras formas de maltrato, así como las
Before I met Andre, Valium was just a pop-‐culture cliché to me. The word conjured up technicolour images of apron-‐clad 1950’s housewives obsessively wiping their white cliffs of cleanliness and going crazy with boredom. ‘Mother’s Little Helper’, it was called, the pill prescribed for women who actually needed a strong dose of second-‐wave feminism. Before Andre I had never encountered it as a medication for a severe anxiety disorder and, judging from its impact on Andre’s life, it had only caused his world to shrink even further.
Perhaps that’s why I never considered taking anti-‐anxiety drugs for my shyness. They didn’t seem to work. Or perhaps I never really thought of myself as ill and in need of medication. I just thought I needed to work a bit harder to control my neurotic fears. Me and half a million other Australians.
When I was tracking down Professor Ron I found a website for the Macquarie
University Anxiety Research Unit where he worked. ‘Over 400,000 adult Australians suffer from significant social anxiety problems each year’, the website informed me, but ‘only a small number of sufferers seek help’. As a result, ‘social anxiety can be life-‐long if not treated effectively and can also lead to depression and alcohol abuse’. I remembered the birthday party in the art gallery and my flight to the safety of the car. If I hadn’t been avoiding alcohol that night, would I have been able to sedate myself out of my state of panic? And might this whole quest to get to the bottom of my shyness never have begun?
Reasons why I love a glass of wine (or three):
– the feel of the cool strong glass in my hot trembling hand, liquid sand alchemised into solid clarity
– the first few sips of tart sweetness and the way they slide down the back of my throat, easing the tightness in there
– the next few sips, tartness gone, nothing but sweetness now, and the way they gently euthanase the butterflies in my belly
– the first few sips of the second glass, firmly clasped in my cool strong hand, and the way they lengthen my sentences, widen my smile
– the next few sips going down my relaxed throat and the way they meet the laughter on its way up
– the last dregs of the second glass, surely the best glass of wine I have ever tasted, at this, the best party I have been to in years
– the first few sips of the third glass and the way my hips have begun swaying ever-‐so-‐ slightly, waiting for just the right music to come on
– the next few sips of the third glass and the way it doesn’t seem to matter if my sentences don’t quite have endings or, um, you know, that thing…
– the last few sips of the third glass – gone so soon? – and the way I can stop talking now and just smile benignly at the lovely, fuzzy people having a lovely, fuzzy time all around me.
Alcohol worked a treat for shyness, as some anonymous wag in cyberspace had attested:
Subject: Fw: Important Advice for all Women Do you suffer from shyness?
Do you sometimes wish you were more assertive? Do you have feelings of inadequacy?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, ask your doctor or pharmacist about Sauvignon Blanc. It can help ease you out of your shyness and let you tell the world that you’re ready and willing to do just about anything.
You will notice the benefits of Sauvignon Blanc almost immediately and, with a regimen of regular doses, shyness and awkwardness will be a thing of the past. Stop hiding and start living. Side effects may include dizziness, nausea, vomiting,
incarceration, erotic lustfulness, loss of motor control, loss of clothing, loss of money, loss of virginity, delusions of grandeur, table dancing, headache,
dehydration, dry mouth, and a desire to sing Karaoke and play all-‐night rounds of Strip Poker, Truth Or Dare and Naked Twister.
One author I had come across would definitely not have been amused by this caricature of a drug company PR blurb. In 2007 English journalist Christopher Lane wrote a book entitled Shyness: how normal behaviour became a sickness.20 Lane set out to prove that
shyness had been deliberately pathologised by a small but influential group of American psychiatrists working hand in glove with the multinational pharmaceutical industry. ‘Shyness isn’t just shyness any more’, Lane wrote.
It’s a disease (with) a variety of over-‐wrought names, including ‘social anxiety’ and ‘avoidant personality disorder’, afflictions said to trouble millions… And since the early 1990s, when (it was) agreed that powerful psychotropic drugs were suitable ways of treating these conditions, countless Americans and Britons have daily
swallowed large doses of Paxil, Prozac, Zoloft and other pills for routine emotions that experts now consider medical conditions.
Lane argued that we have dramatically narrowed our conception of healthy behaviour. Our ‘quirks and eccentricities’, he wrote, have now become problems that we fear and that we expect drugs to fix. It was all part of a pervasive cultural push towards mood
brightening and the consequence, Lane concluded, was ‘a vast, perhaps unrecoverable, loss of emotional range, an impoverishment of human experience’.
Reading Christopher Lane’s elegant well-‐researched rant, I wondered again why I had never asked a doctor for some pills to muffle my anxious what ifs. It’s not as though I had a blanket prejudice against the use of drugs to treat psychological problems. I had several friends whose lives would have been almost intolerable without antidepressants. One of them had literally found life with depression intolerable and had opted instead for a snaking hose filled with carbon monoxide. I had wished, hopelessly and retrospectively, that some smart doctor had thrust a prescription at him before it was too late.
Maybe, for him, anxiety had been in the mix too. According to Professor Ron’s website, anxiety and depression often went together in what was termed a ‘co-‐morbid’
relationship. What a gloomy word morbid was. The dictionary told me it meant ‘of the nature of, or indicative of, disease’, but for me the word morbid was inextricably linked with the word fears.
Ever since that long dark London winter when I turned fifteen, I had had to drag myself out of regular lengthy bouts of profound gloom. As with anxiety, I’d never sought
medication for my gloom, but I understood why others whose gloom was even more crepuscular than mine might need help finding the daylight. Sometimes drugs were the only good solution, at least in the short term.
In retrospect, maybe if I had opted for drugs rather than trying to will my anxieties away, my guts wouldn’t have paid such a high price. Perhaps I could be tucking into a generous bowl of searing hot Indian curry right now instead of waiting for someone to invent a pill that could replace a main meal.
Why had I thought anti-‐anxiety drugs weren’t for me? Did it come back to my
determination not to allow myself to be ‘weak’? All along I’d been convinced that if I just tried hard enough, I could beat this shyness thing. As the daughter of a behavioural scientist, perhaps I had unconsciously absorbed the message that cognitive 115hovellin therapy – even if self-‐prescribed – was a better way to treat psychological distress than popping a pill.
I had to admire Christopher Lane’s painstaking analysis of the complex and
disorders) had been updated to include the psychiatric labels for social anxiety disorders. It seemed to me, though, that Lane sometimes conflated shyness, introspection and introversion, and that he underestimated the distress that social anxiety could cause for shy but sociable people.
‘Almost overnight’, he wrote, ‘shyness and many other routine moods and ailments became bona fide diseases.’ Shyness – a mere ‘routine mood’? I thought of the people I had observed in Professor Ron’s video on social phobia – handsome Jon and loud Lisa and sad Eric – and how palpable their grief was for the years they had wasted being afraid of other humans.
Again I went back to my memories of that birthday party when my legal drug of choice, alcohol, had been off the menu. Tom hadn’t been on the wagon that night. He had started drinking even before he arrived. He had seemed perfectly relaxed, at least for the few brief moments when I’d seen him there. Tom was shy, or so he said, and although he was rarely drunk, he loved a drink or three as much as I did.
The first time I had invited him to a party with my friends Tom was still using heroin. He arrived at my place sleepy-‐eyed and slurring. I remember him leaning against the kitchen bench, staring at me with a wonky grin, while all around him my friends drank a bit more quickly while they adjusted themselves to the disturbing presence of his fame. Now I was curious. Had heroin been his drug of choice to combat these stupid fears? Tom was away again but I sent him some questions in an email. What effect had heroin had on his shyness? ‘My shyness disappeared’, he wrote back. ‘Heroin immediately
lessened all my anxiety, and the right amount – not too much – made me perfectly at ease.’ Falling in love had done the same for me. It hadn’t entirely taken away my physical self-‐ consciousness. That had morphed into a constant state of hyper-‐awareness of where my body was in relation to Tom’s body. But the elation of finding someone whose very presence in the world seemed to be an extension of my own had often made my shyness evaporate, especially in the early days.
So what was Tom’s strategy now, I wondered. How did he put himself at ease since he had given up heroin? It was a conversation to be had in person, not on email, so I left it for later. He would be home soon. Hopefully then we would have some time together, at last.