My Age of Anxiety

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.

I suffer from anxiety and I wanted to see how another person copes with it.

I was never anxious as a child. Well I was afraid of the dark but that’s about all. Then in 2007 I was diagnosed with shizoeffective disorder and all the anxiety that I didn’t have come on all at once. I became so anxious that I became house bound and convinced that all of creation was plotting my demise.

I have tried to tell friends but their advice of just suck it up and get over it never did much good. So lately I have turned to books that have been written by people with anxiety in the hopes that they have found a way to thrive because of it.

I could relate to My Age of Anxiety in so many ways. Reading the authors account of anxiety attacks was like a peek into my own personal hell. He described it so well that I had an attack while reading. Alas like me the author has tried all the therapy and all the meds available but none seem to work really well. What we both have found works is when you feel an attack come on, cram all different sorts of meds in your mouth to hopefully pass out and when you wake your nervous system will be reset. Well, I feel less alone now that I know that at least one other person has popped Klopioion, vodka and other stuff to do this.

Also, like me, the author has tried less orthodox means. This mostly includes smoking pot. I have found that this is the holy grail of anxiety treatment. The author did not seem to have my  success with it. Just goes to show that everyone is different.

I also liked the history that The Age of Anxiety delivers. I never much thought about how people in ancient Greece handle anxiety and I really never thought about how anxiety seems to afflict people in artistic endeavors more than any other field. It was all very interesting to read. It could have been boring but the author has the skill to make even the mundane come to life.

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