My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind Author: Scott Stossel | Language: English | ISBN:
B00F8F7M58 | Format: EPUB
My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind Description
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.
- File Size: 1196 KB
- Print Length: 416 pages
- Publisher: Knopf; 1 edition (January 7, 2014)
- Sold by: Random House LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00F8F7M58
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,209 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
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You do not have to be one of the 40 million Americans* with an anxiety disorder to appreciate Scott Stossel's My Age of Anxiety. Whether or not a reader believes anxiety is worthy of a prized DSM slot and a handshake from Big Pharma, chances are we've all felt its claws at times. Anxiety and stress do seem to be the current Modern Human Condition. (* Source: NIMH dot NIH dot GOV, using US Census data)
Stossel combines survey and memoir so engagingly that I occasionally forgot the topic was how unmanageable anxiety had made his life. I like that his presence throughout the book is not intrusive, or worse, pitiable. He does not overwhelm with dry history and there is no hard lobby for a cause or a position. There is humor and authentic humanity here; most importantly, there is also hope.
In the first few pages, Stossel shares that he has known anxiety since the age of 2. Has anything worked? Surprisingly, no, or at least not for any length of time. And in the last pages, he admits that writing this book is in part self-therapy. In between these auspicious pages Stossel covers:
~ ~ ~ the definitive nature of the beast (Is it an illness? A disorder? A conditioned response?
Who knew that Freud, Darwin, Gandhi and Moses all suffered what could be viewed as anxiety disorders at times? Or that many other great achievers did as well, including Harvard deans and the Atlantic editor who wrote this tome? If you dread public speaking, suffer nervous stomach, obsess over phobias, or hail from a family of worriers, "My Age of Anxiety" might very well make you feel better. The author has been through all of that plus a hundred times more, including losing bowel control at the Kennedy Compound one weekend when he was conducting interviews and getting raw sewage all over their guest bathroom, its rug, and himself. He grew up with a morbid fear of vomiting and, lucky for us readers, exceptional powers of self expression and research. The book chronicles his own life struggles and study of anxiety and is both highly readable and tremendously informative, just like an award-winning Atlantic article on the subject would be.
No matter how much you've read about anxiety, this is likely to offer something more either in the very moving and often stunning personal account or the thoughtful analysis and detail. The book excels in what it covers, mainly the medical model and treatment of anxiety and Mr. Stossel's own hellish experiences. Where it falls somewhat short is in providing enough information on how a man so encumbered by intrusive symptoms and insecurities could manage to excel at Harvard and become a successful editor of a national magazine.
There's also not much on the benefits of exercise, mindfulness meditation, self compassion, or dialectical behavior therapy, and I'd like to see the author delve into these more, as he has other treatments, and report back, both for his own sake and for ours.
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