Social anxiety disorder is marked by an intense fear of judgment, the strong and pervasive sense that most people are thinking poorly of you, and the equally intense urge to avoid most, if not all, social interactions. Many with this diagnosis believe that others are in on a big secret about them. While the paranoia doesn't reach the level of conspiracy, believing that strangers are stealthily working with loved ones against you, there is a milder sense of it — a tacit agreement between those whom you've encountered to spare you of pain.

Because debilitating social anxiety often co-occurs with body dysmorphic disorder, which entails a severe, negative distortion of one's appearance, these individuals struggle with making sense of opposing viewpoints on the one hand (between how they perceive themselves as opposed to how they're perceived) and understanding how others aren't able to see what they do when they look in the mirror. Often, the only reasonable resolution seems to be: they must be lying. And if they are, then they must all, somehow, be in on the lie.

Helping to prolong the disorder is the decision to isolate, indefinitely. The individual, thus, remains stuck with a sadistic companion, who uses all of the mental........

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