Anxiety begins with a single worry, and the more you concentrate on that worry, the more powerful it gets, and the more you worry. It is to say, however, that we shouldn’t be possessive about our uncertainties, particularly as one of the dominant features None of this is to say that ours is a serene age.
#W.H. AUDEN AGE OF ANXIETY PROFESSIONAL#
He wrote, “has certainly come out of the dimness of the professional office into the bright light of the marketplace.” By 1977, the psychoanalyst Rollo May was noting an explosion in papers, books and studies on the subject. Anxiety didn’t emerge as a cohesive psychiatric concept until the early 20th century, whenįreud highlighted it as “the nodal point at which the most various and important questions converge, a riddle whose solution would be bound to throw a flood of light upon our whole mental existence.”Īfter that, the number of thinkers and artists who sought to solve this riddle increased exponentially. Indeed, none even considered anxiety a condition. Wracked by nerves, but none fixated like we do on the condition. The inhabitants of earlier eras might have been Yet there is an aspect of anxiety that we clearly have more of than ever before: self-awareness. It’s hard to imagine that we have it even close to as bad as that. And you could never be certain in which direction you were headed. So was a firm belief in their opposites: the Devil and hell. A firm belief in God and heaven was near-universal, but More one knew, the less sense the world made.” Nor did the monolithic presence of the Church necessarily help it might even have made things worse. The evidence suggests that all this resulted in mass convulsions of anxiety, a period of psychic torment in which, as one historian has put it, “the Wiped out as much as half the population in four years. 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 It is an experience: a coloration in the way one thinks, feels and acts. 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.
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