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Fourteenth-century Europe, for example, experienced devastating famines, waves of pillaging mercenaries, peasant revolts, religious turmoil and a plague that It might simply mean that we are better treated - that we are, as individualsĪnd a culture, more cognizant of the mind’s tendency to spin out of control.Įarlier eras might have been even more jittery than ours. Just because our anxiety is heavily diagnosed and medicated, however, doesn’t mean that we are more anxious than our forebears. The anti-anxiety drug alprazolam - better known by its brand name, Xanax - was the top psychiatric drug on the list, clocking in at 46.3 million prescriptions in 2010. Last spring, the drug research firm IMS Health released its annual report on pharmaceutical That makes anxiety the most common psychiatric complaint by a wide margin, and one for which we are increasingly well-medicated. By comparison, mood disorders - depression and bipolar illness, primarily - affect 9.5 percent. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, anxiety disorders now affect 18 percent of the adult population of the United States, or about 40 million people. When you are on intimate terms with something so monumentally subjective, it is hardĪnd yet it is undeniable that ours is an age in which an enormous and growing number of people suffer from anxiety. You over your salad, convincing you that a choice between blue cheese and vinaigrette is as dire as that between life and death. It is a petty monster able to work such humdrum tricks as paralyzing
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It is an experience: a coloration in the way one thinks, feels and acts.
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The 17th century “The Age of the Throbbing Migraine”: so metaphorical as to be meaningless.įrom a sufferer’s perspective, anxiety is always and absolutely personal. For one thing, when you’ve endured anxiety’s insults for longĮnough - the gnawed fingernails and sweat-drenched underarms, the hyperventilating and crippling panic attacks - calling the 20th century “The Age of Anxiety” starts to sound like calling Of the Western world, “the age of anxiety” has been ubiquitous for more than six decades now.īut is it accurate? As someone who has struggled with chronic anxiety for many years, I have my doubts. Least two dozen books on subjects ranging from science to politics to parenting to sex (“Mindblowing Sex in the Real World: Hot Tips for Doing It in the Age of Anxiety”). Since 1990, it has appeared in the title or subtitle of at The degradation of the environment, nuclear energy, religious fundamentalism, threats to privacy and the family, drugs, pornography, violence, terrorism. From the moment it appeared, the phrase has been used to characterize the consciousness of our era, the awareness of everything perilous about the modern world: It is always and absolutely personal.Īuden’s title, though: that people know. From a sufferer’s perspective, anxiety is not epochal.