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My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind
| Title | My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind |
| Writer | |
| Date | 2024-11-24 14:11:23 |
| Type | |
| Link | Listen Read |
Desciption
A riveting, revelatory, and moving account of the author’s struggles with anxiety, and of the history of efforts by scientists, philosophers, and writers to understand the condition As recently as thirty-five years ago, anxiety did not exist as a diagnostic category. Today, it is the most common form of officially classified mental illness. Scott Stossel gracefully guides us across the terrain of an affliction that is pervasive yet too often misunderstood. Drawing on his own long-standing battle with anxiety, Stossel presents an astonishing history, at once intimate and authoritative, of the efforts to understand the condition from medical, cultural, philosophical, and experiential perspectives. He ranges from the earliest medical reports of Galen and Hippocrates, through later observations by Robert Burton and Søren Kierkegaard, to the investigations by great nineteenth-century scientists, such as Charles Darwin, William James, and Sigmund Freud, as they began to explore its sources and causes, to the latest research by neuroscientists and geneticists. Stossel reports on famous individuals who struggled with anxiety, as well as on the afflicted generations of his own family. His portrait of anxiety reveals not only the emotion’s myriad manifestations and the anguish anxiety produces but also the countless psychotherapies, medications, and other (often outlandish) treatments that have been developed to counteract it. Stossel vividly depicts anxiety’s human toll—its crippling impact, its devastating power to paralyze—while at the same time exploring how those who suffer from it find ways to manage and control it. My Age of Anxiety is learned and empathetic, humorous and inspirational, offering the reader great insight into the biological, cultural, and environmental factors that contribute to the affliction. Read more
Review
Scott Stossel, editor of The Atlantic, has written a searingly honest book entitled, My Age of Anxiety: Fear, hope, dread, and the search for peace of mind. In it he reveals his own agonized search for relief from panic attacks throughout his life and reviews all the theories of the source of anxiety and the treatments for it. He questions whether it is a medical illness, or a philosophical problem, or a psychological problem, or a spiritual condition or a cultural condition. He decides that anxiety is at once a function of biology and philosophy, body and mind, instinct and reason, personality and culture. It is produced by nature and nurture.Following Kierkegaard he suggests that his anxiety might be just a normal human emotional response to life rather than an illness to be diagnosed and treated. Yet Stossel has endured a lifetime of debilitating panic attacks that are truly terrifying.He describes anxiety as apprehension about future suffering – the fearful anticipation of an unbearable catastrophe one is hopeless to prevent. At the root of all clinical anxiety is some kind of existential crisis about growing old, death, the loss of loved ones, the fear of failure and personal humiliation, the struggle for meaning and purpose, and the need for emotional security.He gives us a history of treatment: psychological counseling and the development of anti-anxiety drugs. He has been taking all the different kinds of drugs for twenty years and believes that anxiety has a biological basis yet he admits that the original underpinnings of biological psychiatry has been unraveling. He quotes studies that indicate that new evidence does not support any of the biochemical theories of mental illness, and that psychiatric drugs can do more harm than good. Only about a third of patients get better on antidepressants.Anxiety may be the truest route to self-discovery. Medicating away that anxiety instead of listening to what it’s trying to tell us – listening to Prozac instead of listening to our anxiety – might not be what’s called for if we want to become our best selves. Anxiety may be a signal that something needs to change – that we need to change our lives. Medication risks blocking that signal. He cites the novels of Walker Percy who came to distrust the reductionist worldview that claimed science as the answer to all human problems. Percy came to believe that the high rates of depression and suicide in modern society were owed in part to the dependence on scientific solutions. By focusing on the biological, he said, psychiatry becomes unable to account for guilt, self-consciousness, sadness, shame, anxiety – these were important signals from the world and from our souls. Medicating these signals away as symptoms of organic disease risks alienating us further from ourselves.Stossel agrees with Walker Percy and Kierkegaard yet he still is dependent on taking multiple doses of these drugs and alcohol as well. He relies on Klonopin, Xanax and scotch and admits that this is not healthy. He is aware that there is a history of anxiety disorders in his family and explores his genetic inheritance. Yet he is not willing to become a victim to genetic factors completely beyond his control. Neither is he going to blame his mother for her over-protection or his father for his alcoholism. The challenge is to manage his anxiety so that it becomes a source of strength.Finally, he cites the work of Denis Charney in studying the resilience of Vietnam POW’s. He developed ten critical psychological elements and characteristics of resilience: optimism, altruism, having a moral compass or set of beliefs that cannot be shattered, faith and spirituality, humor, having a role model, social supports, facing fear (or leaving one’s comfort zone) having a mission or meaning in life, and practice in meeting and overcoming challenges.Stossel does not profess any Christian faith. He admits that he is agnostic as far as God is concerned. His last case study in the book is that of Dr. Samuel Johnson who suffered from depressive anxiety, yet was highly productive and a man of deep faith in Christ and prayer. Johnson realized that his infirmity was part of his inheritance of original sin. He sought to manage it by faith in God, a life of prayer and self-discipline, confession of his sins, and trusting in the salvation of Christ on the Cross. Anxiety is part of our sinfulness that can only be managed by an awareness of our dependence on God our Father, our forgiveness through God the Son, and our empowering by God the Holy Spirit. All the existential questions and descriptions of anxiety Stossel lists find their resolution in the medicine of the soul that is the Gospel of Jesus. Our future need not be feared but lived into with hope and joy because of what Christ has done for us.
