My Age Of Anxiety:  Fear, Hope, Dread, And The Search For Peace Of Mind, by Scott Stossel

This particular book disappointed me.  It is obvious that this book seeks to aim to be a part of a select group of texts that are viewed as authoritative personal memoirs that illuminate the struggle of people against mental illness, similar to Burton’s Noonday Demon concerning depression and The Evil Hours [1].  This book does not meet that standard.  Indeed, this book seems to fall into a bit of an uncanny valley when it comes to dealing with anxiety.  On the one hand, the book is too cringeworthy in dealing with the author’s own personal autobiographical details to be worthwhile in examining anxiety as an overall disorder, and far too wedded to various mistaken ideas about anxiety to make his personal story as compelling as it could have been had someone else written about the subject.  Overall, this book just falls flat and fails to provide either understanding about anxiety and its proliferation and its potential benefits or a great deal of respect or empathy for the author himself, who appears rather whiny throughout the volume and not the sort of brave warrior against his mental demons that one would hope for, and I say this as someone who has been clinically diagnosed with anxiety myself.

This particular book is almost 350 pages but sometimes it feels far longer, and is divided into five parts and twelve chapters.  The author begins with a discussion of the riddle of anxiety (I), with chapters on the nature of anxiety (1) and what we talk about when we talk about anxiety (2), with the question of physiology as well as psychology being involved in this definition.  After that the author switches more to memoir mode by talking about a history of his own nervous stomach (II), talking about the connection between anxiety and irritable bowel syndrome (3) and also the problem of performance anxiety (4).  After that there are three chapters dealing with the treatment of anxiety by drugs (III), including the view of the body as a sack of enzymes (5), how drugs created the environment where anxiety disorder was defined (6), and how medication and the meaning of anxiety are intertwined (7).  After that there are three chapters that deal with the interaction between nature and nurture when it comes to anxiety (IV), including the author’s separation anxiety (8) with his dysfunctional parents, an evolutionary account of the genetics of worrying (9), and the discussion of various historical ages of anxiety, including our own (10).  Finally, the book concludes (V) with two chapters on redemption (11) and resilience (12), after which there are acknowledgements, notes, a bibliography, and an index.

Overall, there are at least a few ways that this book could have been considerably better.  The author comes off as a nebbish, and confirms this impression in talking about his bowls, about his anxiety, and about his decades of self-loathing over his anxiety, even if his own anxiety appears to be rather over-determined.  There are several missed opportunities here, including the opportunity to point out the moral aspects of anxiety, which are only touched on somewhat briefly in the author’s antiwar politicking, the positive side of anxiety as being an excess of consciousness and modesty, which are quite good things, and in the ways that anxiety can be overcome by faith and trust, which the author quite entirely neglects to talk about.  It is obvious in the author’s own life that his own lack of faith and trust in his parents as well as in God has a lot to do with his anxiety, and that one can expect a decline in religious belief and practice to lead to an increase in anxiety because people are viewed as being responsible for more things than they were before.  It is entirely unsurprising that an age that wishes to be free would also be anxious, not least anxious because one can be dangerously wrong about the state of the universe and one’s place within it.

[1] https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016/05/15/book-review-the-evil-hours/