My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread and the Search for Peace of Mind

After reading this excerpt in The Atlantic, I had to read the book itself. My Age ofAnxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread and the Search for Peace of Mind, by Scott Stossel, is an exhaustive look at the author’s experience with debilitating anxiety. He is trying to understand why he is so anxious and also how best to treat it. He has every reason to be anxious: his genes, his parents, and his own temperament. He describes some harrowing early experiences with separation anxiety and the less–than-sensitive ways his parents dealt with it. But in another chapter, he describes how his own kids, despite a much different family environment, exhibit some of the same phobias. So after a thorough examination of the research, he sees his anxious self as a product of both nature and nurture.

The book seems more positive about treatment than the magazine article. Stossel has been treated by a bunch of different therapists and psychiatrists over the years. Some of the therapeutic choices seem questionable. For example, Stossel’s father, when he needed a therapist, started seeing his son’s longtime psychiatrist. (It’s nearly always a bad idea for people that close to one another to be separate clients of the same psychotherapist.) The author is most positive about his current therapist, a psychologist who has tried to help him understand the sources and meaning of his anxiety, to provide him with concrete skills to reduce and cope with his anxiety, and who is supportive of medication.  This doctor also makes a point of helping the author to look at his strengths and what he has overcome, rather than simply focusing on his deficits.

This book is filled with information about anxiety and its sufferers—I did not know that Charles Darwin suffered from so much anxiety or that Matt Lauer was phobic about vomiting. There is also much about the history of anxiety and how our definitions and diagnoses have shifted based on research and medication; some disorders, such as social phobia, were popularized after medications were developed. But the most interesting parts are the author’s descriptions of his own struggles. It was terrifying for him to feel so much fear at such a young age. It’s impressive that he has been able to accomplish so much despite it.

Surviving Anxiety: One Man's Story

This month’s Atlantic Magazine features its editor Scott Stossel’s brave discussion of his longstanding and crippling anxiety. What makes it brave? His willingness to graphically describe some of his most shame-filled moments, such as clogging the toilet (loose bowels being one unfortunate symptom of his anxiety) while at the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport researching a book on Sargent Shriver.  I was feeling his pain as he described the experience and his awkward efforts to deal with it.

Where did all this anxiety come from? The author describes himself as something of a perfect storm for anxiety and depression.  There’s a family history of anxiety on both sides of his family going as far back as great-grandparents --including a set of grandparents who fled the Nazis and hid their Jewishness after they were safely in the United States. More immediately, the author’s mother had a host of her own set of fears and phobias, stemming in part from two miscarriages and other difficulties getting pregnant before he was born. In addition, he had a hard-drinking father with little empathy for his son’s emotions. It’s not difficult to see how both the genetic links and the environmental effects might produce an anxious person.  

He describes a host of treatments beginning at age 10 for medication and 11 for therapy. According to the author, nothing has worked. The article certainly gives you a sense of the great variety of treatments for anxiety and also the complexity of helping someone with such a number of symptoms and issues. His article also has you hoping that there is a less dangerous solution out there for a fear of public speaking than Stossel’s own remedy of Xanax, Inderol and scotch and vodka. One thing that struck me in his treatment descriptions was that his therapists and psychiatrists seemed to be very either/or in their approaches—either therapy or medication—so it didn’t seem that there was too much coordination between them.  It seemed he almost needed to hide one from the other.

On a bright note, this man, despite his severe anxiety, has managed to marry and become the editor of the Atlantic. It’s impressive, given the struggles he describes. He describes himself as a duck: “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.” How brave to let others see how hard you have to paddle.