Christopher Lane

Christopher Lane is not a psychiatrist; he’s an English professor specializing in Victorian literature and intellectual history. But he knows as much as many psychiatric professionals do about the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM. Lane received his PhD in English from the University of London. He worked at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the University of Pennsylvania, and Emory University. He was hired at Northwestern University in 2000 and became a full professor at the age of thirty-three. Lane is the author of The Age of Doubt: Tracing the Roots of Our Religious Uncertainty, Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness, and Hatred and Civility: The Antisocial Life in Victorian England. He is editor of the anthology The Psychoanalysis of Race and coeditor of Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis. He currently writes for the Huffington Post and has a popular blog for Psychology Today called “Side Effects.”

— From March 2012