Gender, Psychiatry, and Social Anxiety

A proper critical enquiry into the diagnosis ‘Social Anxiety Disorder’ requires laying some groundwork. To do so, we must journey back not only to see how social anxiety came to be viewed as a psychiatric disorder, but hark back hundreds of years to understand how the medical speciality of psychiatry itself was established. From here, we can chart the biomedical bent that psychiatry’s trajectory has tended to assume and the synchronous rising importance of pharmaceutical remedies. In so doing, the interdependency between culture and psychiatric diagnoses is brought to light. A crucial facet of this reciprocity is how certain diagnoses are imbued with norms of femininity. As such, the second portion of this chapter sees a delving into literatures which have drawn on feminist and anti-psychiatry perspectives to critique overtly gendered psychiatric diagnostic categories—Pre-menstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD) and Female Sexual Dysfunction (FSD), to name but a few. In homing in on key tenets therein, I outline how this book’s approach to women’s SAD will borrow from, and build upon, this extant body of work.