A brief history of anxiety

One of the books on my reading list is A Brief History of Anxiety, by Patricia Pearson, reviewed here. In it, the author explores her own history with anxiety:

Ms. Pearson married and had children. She has a successful writing career. But the woman she describes can barely hold her life together. One night she dreams that she is lying on a cushioned bench admiring the Grand Canyon. Suddenly she realizes that the bench is attached at one end to a cliff face but is otherwise suspended in midair.

“If I moved even an inch in any direction, I would fall for miles,” she writes. “The choking panic that I felt was extraordinary. I felt a perfect — a Platonic — sense of terror.”

That, in a nutshell, is her situation, one that she addresses through therapy, pull-up-your-socks willpower and a blend of religion and the insights of writers like the cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan.

In addition, Pearson uses the book to explore the broader cultural history of anxiety:

Her subject is elusive. Unnamed until Freud coined the term “anxiety neurosis,” the uninvited stranger lurks at the margins of history. When King David, in the Bible, says that “fearfulness and trembling are come upon me,” is he suffering an anxiety attack? Ms. Pearson cites an 18th-century English treatise blaming city living for “a class and set of distempers, with atrocious and frightful symptoms, scarce known to our Ancestors,” that is, “nervous disorders” afflicting a third of the population. Could this be it?

Everywhere and nowhere, anxiety, Ms. Pearson writes, is “unbearably vivid yet insanely abstract.” In many cases it is the fear of fear itself, a free-floating, nebulous entity that, like a mutant virus, feeds on any available host. Reason is powerless against it. Ms. Pearson argues, in fact, that rationalism, intended to banish superstition and fear, has instead removed one of the most effective weapons against anxiety, namely religious faith and ritual.

Even worse, the worship of reason and science, by encouraging the notion that human beings can control their environment, has created a terrible fault line in the modern psyche, although not all societies suffer equally. Mexicans have lots to worry about but don’t. The World Mental Health Survey, conducted in 2002, found that only 6.6 percent of Mexicans had ever experienced a major episode of anxiety or depression. Meanwhile, to their north, 28.8 percent of the American population has been afflicted with anxiety, the highest level in the world. Mexicans who move to the United States adapt, becoming more anxious.

I'd never heard anything like the bit about anxiety rates in Americans, Mexicans, and Mexican-Americans. I'm skeptical; I wonder how much of the result is due to cultural difference. I.e. Are Mexicans culturally less likely than Americans and Mexican-Americans to admit to mental health problems? But the idea that American culture skews towards "the worship of reason and science", and that anxiety rates are higher than they might be otherwise as a result, is an interesting one. In any case, this sounds like a book that's both intelligent and entertaining; I'm looking forward to reading it.