Edvard Munch's 1896 painting entitled "Anxiety."
News Flash:
Anxiety disorder is now the number one mental-health problem in the world.
Update:
Anxiety disorder is disproportionately prevalent in the United States.
Today’s edition of Salon.com featured a searing column after my own heart, in which writer Meredith Maran lays out the situation regarding Americans’ susceptibililty to anxiety disorder. (See my April 16 post on antidepressants, “Knowing Too Little.”)
“Turns out that anxiety disorder -- a spectrum that includes panic, obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress, phobias and the catch-all, generalized anxiety disorder -- is now the most prevalent mental health problem in the world,” Maran writes.
“Like Burger Kings and Botox clinics, AD (anxiety disorder) is disproportionately prevalent in the U.S. According to the most recent World Mental Health Survey, Americans are the most anxious humans on earth,” she goes on. “Forty million of us -- that's 28.8 percent -- suffer from the ailment that the National Institutes of Mental Health defines as ‘an excessive, irrational dread of everyday situations.”
By the way, I bring all this up to amplify my two most recent posts –- the one on the “New Survivalists” who, as you read this, are stocking their basements with still more canned goods, and yesterday's regarding the possibility that fear of apocalyptic cataclysm resides deep in our racial memory.
But racial memory or not, Americans seems to have a particular vulnerability to anxiety, as Maran notes in her article. “We're nine times more likely to be anxious than the Chinese laborers who assemble our children's toys, whose working and living conditions would make us run screaming for a Xanax IV. And 94.4 percent of Mexicans -- bone-crushing poverty and barbed-wire borders notwithstanding -- have never experienced a major episode of anxiety or depression. But move a Mexicano north of the border, according to a study in the December 2004 National Institutes of Health News, and his mental health will deteriorate faster than you can say ‘Campesinos sí, NAFTA no.’
Maran –- like you, like I -- wants to know why.
“I call on Patricia Pearson -- novelist, anxious person and author of A Brief History of Anxiety (Yours and Mine). The book is a genre-busting page turner: a portrait of Pearson's lifelong struggle with anxiety, melded with a journalistic investigation of what ails her, and me and us. ‘Mexicans have stronger family ties, deeper connections to their community, greater involvement in collective rituals through their churches and unions and schools,’ Pearson tells me. ‘And there's less onus on the individual in Mexico to achieve material success.’”
From there, Maran summarizes her own experiences with various therapies and, of course, antidepressants.
(To bring you up to speed, I believe certain antidepressants are valuable for certain people. They can be literal life savers. However, I shudder at the number of people I know who are on them because the medical/pharmaceutical industry treats antipressants as a panacea for almost any negative mood, many of which are natural to our lives as human beings.)
Okay, back to Maran. She and Pearson discuss antidepressants, which Maran refers to as “Pain Begone.”
She writes: “’Drugs can be helpful,’ Pearson allows. ‘But in my case they never resolved the underlying issues.’”
Bingo.
Anxiety disorder is now the number one mental-health problem in the world.
Update:
Anxiety disorder is disproportionately prevalent in the United States.
Today’s edition of Salon.com featured a searing column after my own heart, in which writer Meredith Maran lays out the situation regarding Americans’ susceptibililty to anxiety disorder. (See my April 16 post on antidepressants, “Knowing Too Little.”)
“Turns out that anxiety disorder -- a spectrum that includes panic, obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress, phobias and the catch-all, generalized anxiety disorder -- is now the most prevalent mental health problem in the world,” Maran writes.
“Like Burger Kings and Botox clinics, AD (anxiety disorder) is disproportionately prevalent in the U.S. According to the most recent World Mental Health Survey, Americans are the most anxious humans on earth,” she goes on. “Forty million of us -- that's 28.8 percent -- suffer from the ailment that the National Institutes of Mental Health defines as ‘an excessive, irrational dread of everyday situations.”
By the way, I bring all this up to amplify my two most recent posts –- the one on the “New Survivalists” who, as you read this, are stocking their basements with still more canned goods, and yesterday's regarding the possibility that fear of apocalyptic cataclysm resides deep in our racial memory.
But racial memory or not, Americans seems to have a particular vulnerability to anxiety, as Maran notes in her article. “We're nine times more likely to be anxious than the Chinese laborers who assemble our children's toys, whose working and living conditions would make us run screaming for a Xanax IV. And 94.4 percent of Mexicans -- bone-crushing poverty and barbed-wire borders notwithstanding -- have never experienced a major episode of anxiety or depression. But move a Mexicano north of the border, according to a study in the December 2004 National Institutes of Health News, and his mental health will deteriorate faster than you can say ‘Campesinos sí, NAFTA no.’
Maran –- like you, like I -- wants to know why.
“I call on Patricia Pearson -- novelist, anxious person and author of A Brief History of Anxiety (Yours and Mine). The book is a genre-busting page turner: a portrait of Pearson's lifelong struggle with anxiety, melded with a journalistic investigation of what ails her, and me and us. ‘Mexicans have stronger family ties, deeper connections to their community, greater involvement in collective rituals through their churches and unions and schools,’ Pearson tells me. ‘And there's less onus on the individual in Mexico to achieve material success.’”
From there, Maran summarizes her own experiences with various therapies and, of course, antidepressants.
(To bring you up to speed, I believe certain antidepressants are valuable for certain people. They can be literal life savers. However, I shudder at the number of people I know who are on them because the medical/pharmaceutical industry treats antipressants as a panacea for almost any negative mood, many of which are natural to our lives as human beings.)
Okay, back to Maran. She and Pearson discuss antidepressants, which Maran refers to as “Pain Begone.”
She writes: “’Drugs can be helpful,’ Pearson allows. ‘But in my case they never resolved the underlying issues.’”
Bingo.
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