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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.
Notas del autor
Scott Stossel is the editor of The Atlantic. He is the author of Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver and My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reseñas (6)
Reseña de Publisher's Weekly
Veteran magazine editor Stossel fuses his own account of lifelong chronic anxiety with a medical history of this baffling psychiatric condition that plagues an increasingly larger percentage of the population even as the range of available treatment options has become more varied. Narrator Goldstrom takes great pains to adopt Stossel's journalist/insider identity in his delivery, conveying genuine emotion, but muting his tone enough to keep the production from emphasizing the personal at the expense of the larger scientific and societal issues. Still, Goldstrom's rendering of some of Stossel's autobiographical anecdotes do stand out as dramatic, particularly his therapeutic session to conquer phobia related to vomiting, as well as a panic attack involving a series of misadventures in a guest bathroom at the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis Port, Mass. Goldstrom also does an especially effective job reading the pharmacological and psychological portions of the narrative in a smooth broadcasting style that helps make the material more accessible and engaging. A Knopf hardcover. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Reseña de Booklist
*Starred Review* Stossel, editor of the Atlantic magazine, is a very nervous man trying awfully hard not to be. I have since the age of about two been a twitchy bundle of phobias, fears, and neuroses. He suffers from lots of physical symptoms and a panoply of phobias (most notably, a fear of vomiting). I'm like Woody Allen trapped in John Calvin, he confesses. Psychotherapy, multiple medications, and alcohol provide incomplete relief. He ponders the possible causes of panic attacks and anxiety: a strong genetic component, environmental influences, and childhood upbringing. He wonders whether anxiety is purely a psychological problem or something else a medical disease, spiritual disorder, cultural phenomenon, or evolutionary survival mechanism. For a layperson, he has considerable knowledge about prescription anti-anxiety drugs (perhaps based on three decades of using them). Tying together notions about anxiety culled from history, philosophy, religion, sports, and literature with current neuropsychiatric research and his extensive personal experience, Stossel's book is more than an astounding autobiography, more than an atlas of anxiety. His deft handling of a delicate topic and frustrating illness highlights the existential dread, embarrassment, and desperation associated with severe anxiety yet allows room for resiliency, hope, and transcendence. Absolutely fearless writing.--Miksanek, Tony Copyright 2010 Booklist
Reseña de New York Review of Books
AS A YOUNG boy, Scott Stossel, the editor of The Atlantic magazine, worried every time his parents left: They'd die, he would think, or else abandon him. Years later, wild with stage fright, he hid in a bathroom to avoid getting a trophy on the dais. By adulthood, Stossel was saddled with often incapacitating nerves. His new book, "My Age of Anxiety," uses his experience as a guide through the disorder, tracing its legacy in thought and culture. He seeks to understand what anxiety is and what it means; he probes the condition's ambiguities. The result is ambitious, and bravely intimate: a ruminative book that often breaks into a thrilling intellectual chase. An estimated 40 million American adults have anxiety disorders in a given year, and one in four will suffer an anxiety disorder at some point in their lifetimes. Stossel shares a widely held suspicion that the true numbers are higher, since a tot of people press on without mentioning symptoms to doctors. (I've never sought or received an anxiety diagnosis; I'd also be entirely unsurprised to get one.) Trickier still, experts don't agree on exactly what anxiety is. The most authoritative description, from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, has defined it as a six-month period of uncontrollable worry accompanied by three or more persistent problems: restlessness, fatigue, concentration issues, irritability, muscle tension or "sleep disturbance." Clusters of these symptoms probably describe the entire city of New York. Does this mean that anxiety disorder is a chimera, invented by people trying to pathologize your quirks and mine? Stossel thinks not. Although anxiety has been called many things over the years - black bile to the ancient Greeks, neurasthenia to the Victorians - the problem is old. Stossel also has the proof of his experience. Today, his anxieties include claustrophobia, acrophobia, aerophobia and a mysterious fear of cheese. Also: panic attacks, a nervous stomach, stage fright He has bolted in the middle of interviews and speaking gigs. He has soiled himself on airplanes. At the altar, preparing to take his wedding vows, he looked so fitful and intensely sweaty that the minister asked if he was O.K. He was and he wasn't, as he fought the shaking of his limbs, "the urge to vomit, and unconsciousness." True to the disorder, though, most of Stossel's anxiousness anticipates what hasn't occurred. A persistent problem is his emetophobia: the fear of vomiting. It governs his life, to the extent that he maintains a mental catalog of gastroenteritis outbreaks, carries stomach medication with him at all times and hoards airsick bags. He finds it hard to enjoy heightened social moments. (He pulled away from his first kiss because he felt sure he would throw up on the young woman in question.) Most people would find Stossel's vigilance excessive, especially since, by his own admission, he hasn't vomited since 1977. But these regurgitation-free decades only raise his guard. Californians will recognize his wary pessimism as earthquake thinking: a long hiatus means not safety but a crisis deferred. The mutinies of nature - often of the body - scare him most. Stossel's current therapist suggests that reflexes like vomiting foreshadow the ultimate corporeal letting go: death. (And who wants that?) But Stossel also traces the idea, appearing often and across disciplines, that anxiety is essentially a consequence of modern life. We're not made for this sort of thing, the thinking goes. And because our animal nature can't find comfort in today's demands, we're constantly on edge - which makes bodies like Stossel's protest all the more. The resulting situations might, elsewhere, make for fine farce. Stossel remembers a summer he spent with the Kennedys, in Hyannis Port, researching his first book, about Sargent Shriver. While he was out one afternoon, his nervous stomach stirred, and he could find no restroom. 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Stossel was in the midst of hiding his pants in a cupboard when the dinner bell rang: The illustrious guests were being summoned to a living room, directly opposite the bathroom door. He wrapped his lower half in a sewage-y towel and ran for it, nearly colliding with an "utterly unfazed" John F. Kennedy Jr. One suspects this escapade reveals more about the goings-on in Camelot than about Stossel's self-consciousness. But his hair-trigger shame reflex fires indiscriminately. "That's him," he imagines people sneering. "The one who can't control his own bodily functions." Plaintive self-flagellation is a refrain in "My Age of Anxiety" - and, alas, the book's most tedious feature. In his fretting, Stossel sometimes overlooks the implications of his premise: If anxiety is a chemical disorder, then it shouldn't require any more apology than an epileptic's seizures. Or should it? "My Age of Anxiety" offers dazzlingly comprehensive taxonomies of anxiety-related theory, past and present, and in the process bears out Stossel's wan ambivalence: Much of the research is notably inconclusive. Data over decadeshave (unfortunately) suggested a link between a mother's behavior and a baby's lifelong anxiety level. But it's unclear whether that's due to nurture or because anxious mothers pass on their dispositions genetically. And although research has found chemical sources of stress resilience (one is called neuropeptide Y; those rich in it seem immune to PTSD), lack of anxiety and heroism aren't the same. Stossel discusses the basketball star Bill Russell, who seemed to thrive only as a nervous wreck. William James - all the Jameses, actually - fueled culture-changing work with powerful neuroses. Stossel barely notes it, but he himself leads a nationally scrutinized, occasionally provocative publication. Audacity and heroism rise from many sources. Which brings us to the drugs. With characteristic fair-mindedness, Stossel, who's tried nearly everything (his current public-speaking preparations include Xanax, Inderal and vodka), presents opposing extremes: "cosmetic psychopharmacology" and "pharmacological Calvinism." People leaning toward the first argue that anxiety is a correctable imbalance. Yet the data pool behind many drugs is less persuasive than consumers may think. (Anxiety medications appear to "work" less well in China.) Also, how not to quell tomorrow's William James? The trade-off is hazy. At a dinner party of artists and writers, Stossel found that "each of the other nine people within earshot" had been medicated for anxiety. These were not dysfunctional failures, he explains, but vaunted novelists and war correspondents. (The war correspondent was anxious not about the battlefield but about editors.) "Maybe," Stossel gently speculates, "these stories simply provide evidence that writers are crazy." Maybe. Or maybe anxious temperaments aren't the cut-and-dried impediments some would suppose. Stossel notes that people with manageable anxiety often do better work than their blithe, breezy counterparts; they're long-thinking and less easily satisfied. The condition, at debilitating extremes, clearly requires treatment. Yet locating those extremes - when do the defining aspects of selfhood become its obstacle? - is harder, and Stossel shows we still can't mark the line with any science. Must we? "I am living on the razor's edge between success and failure, adulation and humiliation - between justifying my existence and revealing my unworthiness to be alive," he writes. In his mind, the unsettledness is problematic. But to many people, anxious or not, it will sound like a state of grace. Stossel's anxieties include claustrophobia, acrophobia and a fear of cheese. NATHAN HELLERS is a staff writer for The New Yorker and a film and TV critic for Vogue.
Reseña de Choise
Stossel (editor of The Atlantic and a freelance writer) takes an interesting approach to describing anxiety disorders. As a magazine editor and journalist, he did copious research for the book, revealing numerous facts most readers are not likely to know about various kinds of anxiety. However, he departs from a purely objective, dispassionate account of anxiety disorders by boldly revealing his own battle with panic disorder and specific phobias. In an unflinching way that truly compels one to keep reading, Stossel shares the story of his lifelong struggles with anxiety in its various manifestations, along with that of his family members and notable personalities. In doing so, he helps readers gain deeper insight into the phenomenology of such disorders in a fashion similar to that of Peter Kramer, who shared the world of psychiatry from his perspective after the advent of Prozac. Thus, the book engenders empathy for the author and all who experience such disorders. It further helps readers question the nature of anxiety on both a philosophical and a lived level. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates; professionals; general readers. A. L. Bizub Elmira College
Kirkus Review
In this captivating and intimate book, the editor of the Atlantic spares no detail about his lifelong struggle with anxiety and contextualizes his personal experience within the history of anxiety's perception and treatment. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, nearly one in seven Americans currently suffers from some form of anxiety. Stossel (Sarge: The Life and Times of Sergeant Shriver, 2004), whose assorted phobias and neuroses began to manifest when he was a toddler, provides an exceptionally relatable and frequently hilarious account of a modern sufferer: the endless combinations of therapy and drugs, pharmaceutical and otherwise; the inevitable mishaps of a public figure who is terrified of flying, enclosed spaces and speaking in public; the delicate negotiation between managing psychological torment and being a husband and father. Alongside these anecdotes--one of which, involving the Kennedy family, is laugh-out-loud funny--the author explores how anxiety has affected humans for centuries and how there is still no "cure." Instead, anxiety is a "riddle" with very personal and diverse factors and symptoms, and it affects people from all walks of life. Many great minds, including Freud and Darwin, documented their battles with anxiety. They also experimented with chemical interventions, testimony of a long history of sought-after relief from anxiety's debilitating effects. Stossel deftly explores a variety of treatments and their risks and successes, providing unique insight as both a journalist (whose priority is impartial investigation) and sufferer (whose imperative is to feel well). Throughout, the author's beautiful prose and careful research combine to make this book informative, thoughtful and fun to read. Powerful, eye-opening and funny. Pitch-perfect in his storytelling, Stossel reminds us that, in many important ways, to be anxious is to be human.]]]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Offering a candid look at his life as an anxiety patient, Stossel (editor, The Atlantic) reviews the history of anxiety as far back as Galen and Hippocrates, the current treatments, risks and side effects, and neuropsychiatric research. He focuses in this autobiographical work on the biological, cultural, and environmental factors that contribute to debilitating anxiety. Michael Goldstrom presents a steady pace, pleasant voice, and expressive reading of this well-told narrative. verdict This candid and factual discussion of a common yet rarely discussed mental health concern will be of interest to those diagnosed or living with anxiety disorder, self-help readers and biography/memoir fans.-Laurie Selwyn, formerly with -Grayson Cty. Law Lib., Sherman, TX (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Extractos
Extractos
Some eighty years ago, Freud proposed that anxiety was "a riddle whose solution would be bound to throw a flood of light on our whole mental existence." Unlocking the mysteries of anxiety, he believed, would go far in helping us to unravel the mysteries of the mind: consciousness, the self, identity, intellect, imagination, creativity -- not to mention pain, suffering, hope, and regret. To grapple with and understand anxiety is, in some sense, to grapple with and understand the human condition. The differences in how various cultures and eras have perceived and understood anxiety can tell us a lot about those cultures and eras. Why did the ancient Greeks of the Hippocratic school see anxiety mainly as a medical condition, while Enlightenment philosophers saw it as an intellectual problem? Why did the early existentialists see anxiety as a spiritual condition, while Gilded Age doctors saw it as a specifically Anglo-Saxon stress response -- a response that they believed spared Catholic societies -- to the Industrial Revolution? Why did the early Freudians see anxiety as a psychological condition emanating from sexual inhibition, whereas our own age tends to see it, once again, as a medical and neurochemical condition, a problem of malfunctioning biomechanics? Do these shifting interpretations represent the forward march of progress and science? Or simply the changing, and often cyclical, ways in which cultures work? What does it say about the societies in question that Americans showing up in emergency rooms with panic attacks tend to believe they're having heart attacks, whereas Japanese tend to be afraid they're going to faint? Are the Iranians who complain of what they call "heart distress" suffering what Western psychiatrists would call panic attacks? Are the ataques de nervios experienced by South Americans simply panic attacks with a Latino inflection -- or are they, as modern researchers now believe, a distinct cultural and medical syndrome? Why do drug treatments for anxiety that work so well on Americans and the French seem not to work effectively on the Chinese? As fascinating and multifarious as these cultural idiosyncrasies are, the underlying consistency of experience across time and cultures speaks to the universality of anxiety as a human trait. Even filtered through the distinctive cultural practices and beliefs of the Greenland Inuit a hundred years ago, the syndrome the Inuit called "kayak angst" (those afflicted by it were afraid to go out seal hunting alone) appears to be little different from what we today call agoraphobia. In Hippocrates's ancient writings can be found clinical descriptions of pathological anxiety that sound quite modern. One of his patients was terrified of cats (simple phobia, which today would be coded 300.29 for insurance purposes, according to the classifications of the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual , the DSM-V ) and another of nightfall; a third, Hippocrates reported, was "beset by terror" whenever he heard a flute; a fourth could not walk alongside "even the shallowest ditch," though he had no problem walking inside the ditch -- evidence of what we would today call acrophobia, the fear of heights. Hippocrates also describes a patient suffering what would likely be called, in modern diagnostic terminology, panic disorder with agoraphobia ( DSM-V code 300.22): the condition, as Hippocrates described it, "usually attacks abroad, if a person is travelling a lonely road somewhere, and fear seizes him." The syndromes described by Hippocrates are recognizably the same clinical phenomena described in the latest issues of the Archives of General Psychiatry and Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic . Their similarities bridge the yawning gap of millennia and circumstances that separate them, providing a sense of how, for all the differences in culture and setting, the physiologically anxious aspects of human experience may be universal. In this book, I have set out to explore the "riddle" of anxiety. I am not a doctor, a psychologist, a sociologist, or a historian of science -- any one of whom would bring more scholarly authority to a treatise on anxiety than I do. This is a work of synthesis and reportage, yoking together explorations of the idea of anxiety from history, literature, philosophy, religion, popular culture, and the latest scientific research -- all of that woven through something about which I can, alas, claim extensive expertise: my own experience with anxiety. Examining the depths of my own neuroses may seem the height of narcissism (and studies do show that self-preoccupation tends to be tied to anxiety), but it's an exercise with worthy antecedents. In 1621, the Oxford scholar Robert Burton published his canonical The Anatomy of Melancholy , a staggering thirteen-hundred-page work of synthesis, whose torrents of scholarly exegesis only partially obscure what it really is: a massive litany of anxious, depressive complaint. In 1733, George Cheyne, a prominent London physician and one of the most influential psychological thinkers of the eighteenth century, published The English Malady , which includes the forty-page chapter "The Case of the Author" (dedicated to "my fellow sufferers"), in which he reports in minute detail on his neuroses (including "Fright, Anxiety, Dread, and Terror" and "a melancholy Fright and Panick, where my Reason was of no Use to me") and physical symptoms (including "a sudden violent Head-ach," "extream Sickness in my Stomach," and "a constant Colick, and an ill Taste and Savour in my Mouth") over the years. More recently, the intellectual odysseys of Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, and William James were powerfully driven by their curiosity about, and the desire to find relief from, their own anxious suffering. Freud used his acute train phobia and his hypochondria, among other things, to construct his theory of psychoanalysis; Darwin was effectively housebound by stress-related illnesses after the voyage of the Beagle -- he spent years in pursuit of relief from his anxiety, visiting spas and, on the advice of one doctor, encasing himself in ice. James tried to keep his phobias hidden from the public but was often quietly terrified. "I awoke morning after morning with a horrible dread in the pit of my stomach and with a sense of insecurity of life that I never knew before," he wrote in 1902 of the onset of his anxiety. "For months, I was unable to go out in the dark alone." Unlike Darwin, Freud, and James, I'm not out to adumbrate a whole new theory of mind or of human nature. Rather, this book is motivated by a quest to understand, and to find relief from or redemption in, anxious suffering. This quest has taken me both backward, into history, and forward, to the frontiers of modern scientific research. I have spent much of the past eight years reading through hundreds of thousands of the pages that have been written about anxiety over the last three thousand years. My life has, thankfully, lacked great tragedy or melodrama. I haven't served any jail time. I haven't been to rehab. I haven't assaulted anyone or carried out a suicide attempt. I haven't woken up naked in the middle of a field, sojourned in a crack house, or been fired from a job for erratic behavior. As psychopathologies go, mine has been -- so far, most of the time, to outward appearances -- quiet. Robert Downey Jr. will not be starring in the movie of my life. I am, as they say in the clinical literature, "high functioning" for someone with an anxiety disorder or a mental illness; I'm usually quite good at hiding it. More than a few people, some of whom think they know me quite well, have remarked that they are struck that I, who can seem so even-keeled and imperturbable, would choose to write a book about anxiety. I smile gently while churning inside and thinking about what I've learned is a signature characteristic of the phobic personality: "the need and ability" -- as described in the self-help book Your Phobia -- "to present a relatively placid, untroubled appearance to others, while suffering extreme distress on the inside." * To some people, I may seem calm. But if you could peer beneath the surface, you would see that I'm like a duck -- paddling, paddling, paddling. * "For many, many people who have anxiety disorders -- particularly agoraphobia and panic disorder -- people would be surprised to find out that they have problems with anxiety because they seem so'together' and in control," says Paul Foxman, a psychologist who heads the Center for Anxiety Disorders in Burlington, Vermont. "They seem to be comfortable, but there's a disconnection between the public self and the private self." Excerpted from My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind by Scott Stossel All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.Tabla de contenido
| Part I The Riddle of Anxiety | |
| 1 The Nature of Anxiety | p. 3 |
| 2 What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Anxiety? | p. 32 |
| Part II A History of My Nervous Stomach | |
| 3 A Rumbling in the Belly | p. 65 |
| 4 Performance Anxiety | p. 96 |
| Part III Drugs | |
| 5 "A Sack of Enzymes" | p. 151 |
| 6 A Brief History of Panic; or, How Drugs Created a New Disorder | p. 179 |
| 7 Medication and the Meaning, of Anxiety | p. 200 |
| Part IV Nurture Versus Nature | |
| 8 Separation Anxiety | p. 229 |
| 9 Worriers and Warriors: The Genetics of Anxiety | p. 262 |
| 10 Ages of Anxiety | p. 295 |
| Part V Redemption and Resilience | |
| 11 Redemption | p. 313 |
| 12 Resilience | p. 328 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 339 |
| Notes | p. 343 |
| Bibliography | p. 365 |
| Index | p. 385 |
