because I could not stop for paroxetine . . .

In its review of Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness by Christopher Lane, Scientific American Magazine asks, “Would Henry David Thoreau and Emily Dickinson be given drugs today?”

Lane’s thesis is that the DSM, psychiatry’s handbook, was re-written in the 1980s with an eye toward pathologizing emotion, largely at the behest of pharmaceutical companies that stood to gain from the prescriptions for shyness, compulsion, and bad attitudes that could be written under the guise of new clinical disorders. And it certainly does seem that the dys-pharma-topia predicted in Brave New World, when a few well-designed pills can smooth out the rough edges of personality and temper the storms of emotion.

Dickinson is a handy touchstone of shyness, though perhaps she wasn’t quite the recluse we want to imagine. She was, after all, well known in Amherst as a knowledgeable botanist and master gardener, which implies that she rubbed a few shoulders. And she carried on lively correspondences with many people; though a shy person might hide behind pens and stationery, Dickinson’s letters display an openness and humor that are far from bashful.

The most telling observation comes, perhaps, from Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Dickinson’s editor: on first meeting her, he observed, “she talked soon & thenceforward continuously . . . sometimes stopping to ask me to talk instead of her — but readily recommencing.” Introverted, perhaps; protective of her poetry, certainly; but simply shy?

In any case, though, paroxetine would certainly have changed things, probably not for the better . . .