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

Scott Stossel

Jan 2014 · Sold by Vintage

About this ebook

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.

Ratings and reviews

A wonderful book. An anxious person may find a reassuring kinship in the personal journey of the author. Mr. Stossel effectively communicates the struggles of the anxious without plucking at heart strings or asking for pity. The history of attitudes toward anxiety and treatment thereof was interesting (and disturbing). Most importantly, a non-anxious person may find a way to empathize with the quirks and perceived inadequacies that plague the anxiety proned in their lives.

I read, related, cried, laughed. Great perspective and an outstanding book from start to finish. Would recommend this to anyone who copes with anxiety.

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About the author

Scott Stossel is the editor of The Atlantic and the author of Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver. His articles and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New Republic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. He lives with his family in Washington, D.C.