I was painfully shy and nervous a child, until an alarming age I literally hid behind my mum's skirt in public places. I'm in my 30's now and pretty confident, but the unbearable nervousness lasted into my late teens. I'm pretty sure had i been a child now I'd have been diagnosed with anxiety
Yes Gunpowder I think there's a spectrum here: I had that kind of shyness & anxiety until my early to mid-20s. It was severe shyness - but it wasn't some of the extreme ill-health described here - some harrowing stories. Those are not the stories/conditions I think are being pathologised.
It's the attribution of normal difficult things like anxiety, shyness etc to mental ill-health. Instead of seeing these as normal - that emotions and personal interactions can sometimes be difficult. But we have to learn how to deal with them.
For example, I was visiting some friends of friends (with my friends IYSWIM). One of the friends' friends' children feel over while running around in a game. The child was 12 or 13 or so. His response to his bloodied scratched knees was a total meltdown. Hi father had to carry him to the house. Any attempt at first aid - cleaning the wound, to get the gravel out, etc was met with more racking sobs interspersed with screams. His parents put him in a bath and one or other of them was with him for about 30 minutes.
Other adults nodded gravely and said "Oh, he has anxiety."
I found this all quite disturbing - it was a normal fall & a cut knee. Until that point the boy seemed 'normal ' - playing, chatting etc. The parents seemed over-solicitous and anxious themselves at the consequences of normal rough & tumble play.
Now it could be that he had an underlying mental health problem, which meant that he over-reacted to a normal injury. But the way he was treated seemed to be contributing to his meltdown. It was as if the damage to his knee (quite quite minor) was a mortal insult to their son.
The whole thing was just odd.