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.