Explore the history of social anxiety disorder, from ancient times to now. We'll learn about the evolution of social anxiety and how it has changed over time.
If you're looking for information about social anxiety disorder, this video is for you! We'll learn about the history of social anxiety, its origins, and how you can best manage this condition. After watching this video, you'll have a much better understanding of social anxiety and how to conquer it!
Have you ever wondered when social anxiety became publicly known? I mean, it's existed forever, but it hasn't always been recognized as a mental health disorder. When did we figure that out, and how has it changed from the beginning to the present time? It goes back wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy further and way deeper than you're probably thinking.
Let's start at the beginning. But before we do, I want to thank verywellmind. com because they list out this timeline of social anxiety's beginning and kind of how it's progressed. And I used that as kind of a template for this video and then did some deeper dives into it. to kind of more fully expand the timeline, but I will put the link in the description to their timeline.
So you can go check that out, read it. Now the idea of social anxiety actually goes as far back as 400 BC, according to a book that was printed in 1525 and written all in Latin, Hippocrates describes a very shy person as someone who loves darkness as life and thinks Every man is observing him. That last line in particular really fits the definition of social anxiety.
Which, before moving forward, I should probably tell you what we have now as the definition of social anxiety, so you can see how it's changed from the beginning. According to the DSM 5, which, if you're not familiar, the DSM is basically The dictionary for mental health disorders. And right now, we're on our, you know, fifth version of it.
It defines social anxiety as a marked fear or anxiety about one or more social situations in which the individual is exposed to possible scrutiny by others. Examples include social interactions, for example, having a conversation, meeting a familiar people, or being observed, eating or drinking, and performing in front of others.
Giving a speech. There's other criteria in the DSM 5 that gets it a little bit more detailed But we're not gonna get into all that because that's really just the main part of it So this has been known about for a while just to give you some reference of how long we've known about social anxiety We've known about it since the invention of 2, 400 years to the early 1900s Psychiatrists started to use terms such as social phobia and social neurosis, I believe is how you pronounce it, to refer to extremely shy patients.
As we know now, being shy and socially anxious is two totally different things. Hey, you, yeah, you real quick, real quick, real quick. Why don't you go ahead and subscribe that way you make sure you're constantly getting the content I'm putting out there about mental health, social anxiety that I do in a fun and entertaining way.
In the 1950s, a South African psychiatrist by the name of Joseph Wolpe developed something called systematic desensitization. Desensitization. Desensitization. That's tough. Which is just a form of exposure therapy. You know I love exposure therapy. When I looked up systemic desensitization, this is what I found.
In the first part of the therapy, the patient is taught relaxation training. Once proficiency and relaxation is attained, The patient is gradually exposed to the trauma related items that frighten him or her, starting with the last feared situation, object, or memory. The patient is instructed to note the onset of anxiety symptoms, and the treatment is paused while the patient initiates relaxation techniques.
When the patient has regained a sense of comfort, the exposure resumes. This cycle continues until the patient can tolerate all the stimuli on the fear hierarchy without anxiety. A decade later, a South African psychiatrist Isaac Marx. Gosh, I guess, uh, South Africa, they're really like the, the birthplace of social anxiety.
But anyways, he came up with the idea that social phobia, aka social anxiety as we now know it, should be in a different kind of category and not with the other phobias listed. And apparently he used to do some transition therapy for gay and Transgendered people via electroshock therapy? Oh no! Of course, it's easy to scrutinize people from 60 years ago.
In the same decade, we had our first documented, or at least I believe to be first documented, situation where a celebrity kind of opened up and talked about their own anxiety. It's pretty common nowadays to talk about anxiety and mental health. You see a lot of celebrities do that. But... Back in 1967, not a common thing.
And it was probably quite the shock when Barbara Streisand, she was the one who's, uh, initially opened up about anxiety for the first time. And she tells a story about how she was doing a live concert that was actually being streamed on TV in Central Park in New York. There was over 135, 000 people there.
And apparently she forgot the lyrics. To the song. And, you know, later on afterwards, she talked about that, you know, I, she had anxiety and that was the reason that she forgot the lyrics to it. I think there used to actually be a Netflix documentary on this whole event. Although I don't think it's on Netflix anymore.
I could be wrong, but it's really interesting story. And it was a really big deal because it's like one of the first ever concerts that was filmed for TV, like live. So like there was a lot going on for her, not was she only, was she just. Performing to, you know, over a hundred thousand people, which would be crazy for us.
Right. We would be like, man, that would be really anxious feeling, but also having a, you know, TV being streamed live to millions of people, which was brand new back then. I mean, obviously it'd be very anxiety ridden now, but especially back then, like that wasn't even a things like, man, so many eyeballs on me a year later, the.
Second edition of the DSM was published saying social fears were described as a specific phobia of social situations or excessive fear of being observed or scrutinized by others at this point in history the definition of Social anxiety was was very narrow. Whereas now there is just there's a there's a lot of criteria Like I said before in 1980 the third edition of the DSM became public and officially marked social phobia as an official psychiatric diagnosis.
In this edition, social phobia was described as a fear of performance situations and not so much kind of just So it didn't include fears such as like casual conversations, for example. So anybody who was fearing, let's say, you know, casual conversations and a psychiatrist was working with them, they'd be more likely to associate that with.
Avoidant personality disorder
in the year of the Super Bowl shuffle. Our boy Michael Leibowitz and another clinical psychologist, Richard Heimberg, really started digging deep into researching what social phobia slash social anxiety is, putting some more research into it because at that time they. was considered like the neglected anxiety disorder.
Two years later, probably to the credit of Heimberg and Leibovitz, a revision of the DSM led to some changes in some of the diagnostic criteria. A diagnosis now required that the symptoms cause Interference or marked distress rather than simply significant stress. Don't ask me how to explain the difference between those Finally the year after I was born 1994 they decided to change the term social phobia to social anxiety and in this edition of the DSM social anxiety was defined as Marked in persistent fear of one or more social or performance situations in which the person is exposed to unfamiliar people or possible scrutiny by others.
Jumping into the 21st century, Zach Grunke was probably the first. You know, celebrity or public figure rather that specifically talked about his struggles with social anxiety. Zach is a professional baseball player. He plays in the MLB. He actually still plays in the MLB, but he almost lost his career due to social anxiety.
Yeah. Imagine being a professional baseball player and you're the pitcher. So eyes are on you all the time. You have 162 games a year. Where millions of people are watching you throw the ball every game and I thought I had it bad side note This does prove once again that money does not cure social anxiety nor can it this just about ends the history of social anxiety as Pretty much the last notable thing to happen with social anxiety happened in 2013, which was when the current version, the DSM 5, was published and had very few minor changes to the definition of social anxiety, the criteria.
All that good stuff and that's the history of social anxiety. Will there be more updates to social anxiety, its definition, what it really means in the future? What do you think? So give me your guesses in the comments of what you think may be added or taken away from social anxiety. Where does the timeline go?
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