Narrating Social Order: Agoraphobia and the Politics of Classification.

Naomi Brun is a freelance writer and a book reviewer for The Hamilton
Spectator.

Narrating Social Order is the first book-length critical examination of agoraphobia to appear in over twenty years. The book began originally as a doctoral thesis, and as such, the research is exhaustive. Reuter read every scholarly English-language work available on agoraphobia, beginning with the translation of Carl Westphal’s 1871 Die Agoraphobie, and from those readings she concludes that our understanding and classification of agoraphobia has altered drastically over time.

Before the First World War, agoraphobia was a man’s disease. Men accounted for 80 percent of documented cases, and the goal of treatment for these men a successful return to the workforce. At the time, well-bred women were expected to live within the sphere of the home; it was considered perfectly normal for a woman to experience anxiety about going out into the world, so they would not have been considered agoraphobics. During the war, however, women’s social roles changed, and afterward agoraphobia became primarily classified as a woman’s disease. Getting out into the world, however, did not mean a return to work, but rather a return to shopping.

Reuter proceeds to criticize the medical view of agoraphobia. She looks at how the criteria for agoraphobia in the first four volumes of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) were ever-changing, and suggests that agoraphobia may eventually be dropped from the DSM altogether if it ever reaches a point where it is no longer considered a mental illness.

With painstaking detail, Reuter explains the evolving social understanding of agoraphobia and leads the reader to question definitions of normalcy. This provoking work will undoubtedly become a classic in the field in years to come.