book #114: Social Anxiety Disorder: Research and Practice

The scary* psychiatrist lent me this book when I saw him a month or so ago. I just read it tonight so that I can give it back to him tomorrow. I'm not entirely sure why he gave it to me, since it's clearly meant for people treating SAD patients, not the patients themselves. Most of it was fairly dry statistics about heritability and efficacy of different drugs. It was fairly depressing to read about the average length of illness (25 years) and "low rates of recovery" and the fact that all the drug (and presumably therapy, since they're supposedly equally effective) trials that claim 85% response rates only refer to statistically significant improvements, not necessarily clinically meaningful ones.
Two things made me smile, though. One was a quality of life questionnaire with scores that had a lower limit of "0 (for dead)". You'd think a questionnaire wouldn't need to account for dead people, but I guess it's best to be thorough. The other was a study that noted "the controls had a history of herpes infection", which made me imagine they were using that as a marker for sociability.



*I think he's been downgraded slightly