which was the minimization of mental health disorders and suggestion that shyness equates to a mental health disorder. That's like saying that being disappointed equates to depression

I think the point of the article was more that shyness based on your gender may result in an inability to satisfy basic human desires such as desiring relationships and physical contact which eventually results in mental health problems due to a lack of those things but due to gender expectations shyness is acceptable in certain individuals and thus not causing suffering for those individuals and it may not be acceptable in other individuals thus causing suffering for them. I know that no reputable doctor would diagnose "shyness" and "being disappoitned" as a mental illness directly. But that's not the point. The point is that these "traits" that are benign and thus not diagnosed eventually result in a diagnosable mental illness and since they are the cause (depending on the expectations of society) of the mental illness you're diagnosing them indirectly. It's the same argument that was used in other disorders which at some point were corrected because the suffering is a result of "societal pressure" and not due to them being mentally ill. IF shyness results in mental health problems but these mental health problems are a result of "societal pressure" why wouldn't the same kind of argument apply here as well?

Individuals, for the most part, present to psychiatrists and mental health centers voluntarily.

See, but this statement already makes a lot of assumptions. You don't really know that. They may present voluntarily on the surface, but the question would still be whether they are actually there voluntarily. If you manage to convince people that - I don't know - headaches are a special kind of illness and everyone having a headache should go to special headache treatment centers (I know this analogy sucks) then you can expect people to voluntarily present to those headache treatment centers but it's not truly voluntarily because it's not an correctly informed decision because you lied to them. Similarily, there may be a lot of pressure from people around one to go there "voluntarily". Such as my example above. If society doesn't accept you, what are you supposed to do otherwise? Legally you're there voluntarily, but the truth is just vastly different.

For some reason people write these comments as if the streets are filled with roving gangs of rogue psychiatrists who pull unsuspecting individuals into some dirty van and force-feed them Adderall.

Yeah, I can agree that this is ridiculous.

Here's the thing- psychiatrists go through 4 years of medical school and 4-6 years of residency and fellowship in order to be educated and trained in the care of the human mind and psyche. They're medical doctors. They're not just random people pulled off the street and handed lists of diagnostic criteria and set loose on an unsuspecting public.

But this has no value. The amount of expertise someone has is irrelevant for the question whether their statements are truthful or not, whether they are doing good or not etc. It's irrelevant. You can also study a lot of scientific fields that are not generally accepted as "legit" but they still have a practice, wear a white coat and have fancy looking diplomas on their walls.

You can start an argument with "I'm a professional <xyz>" but it has no bearing, what matters is the correctness of the statement following that. I could say I have more a decade of experience in research in computer science, and then make a lot of statements but that's just completely irrelevant. Debating works by making a claim then follow it up by statements supporting that claim and personal expertise isn't a valid support statement. It may very well be the opposite due to "conformance". People tend to trust people in uniforms, they trust police they trust people wearing white coats. That's a fact. By saying to be one of those you can even get away with more false statements because people are more trusting towards you.

I don't think you understand that, as you seem to think that every disorder is diagnosed by comparing the patient to an "ideal" human.

No. I don't think that every mental illness has a physical/biological origin but of psychological origin while others have a biological origin (most likely disorders such as Schizophrenia), and yes that's my opinion not a fact. But neither is saying every mental illness is of physical/biological origin a fact, at best it's a yet unknown but the likelihood for that to be true is just very, very small.

I can't imagine that someone would tell an individual with severe depression that if society just stopped valuing happiness that their problems would all disappear.

Of course not. But again... this isn't the point. You can MAKE people become depressed. You can MAKE them have an anxiety disorder. In other terms: You can INDUCE a lot of mental illnesses externally. That's the point.

Rather, they often arise from an individual's genetics, anatomy, family, culture, trauma history, romantic relationships, early development, exposure to harmful substances while in the womb, and a multitude of other causes, some of which are still being researched.

And out of those family, culture, romantic relationships are part of society. If society makes it impossible for someone to have romantic relationships. Then this AT THE VERY LEAST plays an important role in the mental well-being of a person.

Despite another user's claim that a majority of people diagnosed with social anxiety disorder just have mild anxiety, I guess in my professional and personal experience, I would disagree.

Yes, I would disagree too. But you need to look at the "reaction chain". It may start with mild anxiety, maybe this mild anxiety causes them to be unable to fulfill certain needs depending on society, in what group they were born, what gender they were born with, whether they live in a city or in a suburban area and and and and and... which then might progress into depression worsening anxiety and THEN you have somebody that is truly mentally ill. You're not diagnosing them as ill because they have mild anxiety but because they HAD mild anxiety which due to environmental circumstences resulted in all the rest.

The kid that gets bullied in school and becomes depressed. NOT a result of a diseased brain, a result of social circumstances. Sure, you could say that due to genetics some people are more resilient to bullying and maybe some people are completely immune but most reasonable people would agree that given enough bullying you'll eventually going to be able to decrease the mental well-being of the victim. I don't even see how this is humane. I would never say to a rape victim with PTSD "meh... you just have bad genes" because they were perfeclty fine people before the incident and it's just WAY more likely that such an EXTERNAL event may cause even healthy people to become mentally ill.

To boil a condition like social anxiety down to a single root cause and minimize it to the "normal human experience" (whatever the hell that is) is irresponsible and insulting.

It is.

Please remove, “social anxiety disorder”, from the nomenclature of the APA. Ultimately we want “social anxiety disorder” out of the DSM.

I know this is obviously bullshit.. I'm not disagreeing with you on that. As you said, there's a HUGE difference between being shy and social anxiety disorder but one might eventually result from the other and being shy might eventually result in depression due to shy not being a beneficial trait given some culture. The article mentions something along the lines of this.

A.) You live in a society where it's acceptable for women to be shy causing no suffering/impairment because men don't mind. B.) You live in a society where it's NOT acceptable for men to be shy causing suffering/impairment because women do not enter relationships with shy men.

In A it's very unlikely that women get depressed for being shy because it's not a problem. In B it's somewhat likely for men to get depressed for being shy because it interferes with their ability to form relationships having a toll on their mental health. In essence, we indirectly would label shy women as healthy and some of the shy men as mentally ill but actually both of them have the exact same trait it's just that women don't accept shy men where as shy men accept women (obviously this is a simplification and whether this actually is true to this extent is a different question but that's irrelevant for this argument, personally I'd say it's at least not entirely wrong that being shy is more acceptable for women than for men but that's not really the point here either, let's treat this as a purely hypothetical scenario because it's the one mentioned in the article). If you'd reverse the gender roles in this scenario then you wouldn't diagnose these shy men as mentally ill because the trait they have causes no problem and instead you would diagnose some of the shy women as being mentally ill because now it's a problem for them.

Or to use that "black pants" scenario. let's say you're actually happy with wearing black pants... but society isn't so you eventually become unhappy with your life and then you'd diagnose that as "black pants disorder". What are you actually diagnosing with that?