Social Anxiety Labelling

In order to understand a label of any kind, we must try to understand the motives and problems of those who are applying the label, as well as understanding the real motives and problems of the person to whom the label is inflicted.

Social anxiety is a label which can assume that people who have worries about being in new groups are therefore anti-social, rather than looking at the nature of different responses and labelling processes. A further assumption that can be made from being deemed anti-social when one is not, is that the person is seen as requiring being socially isolated from others, because he or she has an isolated problem with being with new groups of people.

This kind of response is punitive because it shifts the emphasis from the social to the individual and blames the individual, seeing it as an isolated problem and not a general human or social one, whilst at the same time it is capable of thinking it is a scientific and humane treatment based approach. These aspects of social anxiety labelling in itself are enough to make a person feel uncomfortable about being in the company of new people, as based upon isolation and their experiences of this labelling, and in itself these aspects of the labelling can be a cause of the problem and not a solution.

Social anxiety labelling suggests that the person has a problem with sociality and it stigmatises people as such, when in fact the real problem may be that the person fears being isolated or marginalised, and being absent from a shared or social context. A person who is suffering from so-called social anxiety is therefore really suffering from a fear of social deprivation, and is not anti-social as the label might suggest.

Social anxiety labelling regards the person whom is being labelled as being a social anxiety upon the mental health of others, and this is at the very core and root of the terminology of the label. The label of social anxiety is presented in the plural (as if it is referring to a group of people), when it is really an opinion about an individual and is therefore applied as a singular term. It therefore tends to disregard the pre-existing social or group qualities and skills that the person has, and it individuates the term social to refer to an individual in isolation from any group interaction and contact.

A person could be seen as a social anxiety upon others if the person applying the label can't be bothered to help the person, meaning that helping or learning about others is actually experienced as anxiety by the applicant. Therefore, the application of the labelling is an anxiety with learning or caring about human beings, individuals, or people, and it is a helping, learning, or caring anxiety or inability of the person or people applying the label.