{"product_id":"my-age-of-anxiety-isbn-9780307390608","title":"My Age of Anxiety","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eA \"bravely intimate [and] dazzlingly comprehensive\" history (\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review) \u003c\/i\u003eof efforts by scientists, philosophers, and writers to understand anxiety—from an acclaimed journalist with his own longstanding battle with this often misunderstood affliction.  \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDrawing on his own experience with anxiety, Scott Stossel presents a moving and revelatory account of a condition that affects some 40 million Americans. Stossel offers an intimate and authoritative history. We discover the well-known who have struggled with the condition, as well as the afflicted generations of Stossel's own family. Revealing anxiety's myriad manifestations and the anguish it causes, he also surveys the countless psychotherapies, medications, and often outlandish treatments that have been developed to relieve it. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eStossel vividly depicts anxiety’s human toll—its crippling impact, its devastating power to paralyze. He also explores how individual sufferers—including himself—have managed and controlled symptoms. By turns erudite and compassionate, amusing and inspirational, \u003ci\u003eMy Age of Anxiety\u003c\/i\u003e is the essential account of a pervasive affliction.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cb\u003eA \u003ci\u003eWashington Post\u003c\/i\u003e Notable Book\u003cbr\u003eA \u003ci\u003eSeattle Times\u003c\/i\u003e Best Book of the Year\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Scott Stossel has produced the definitive account of anxiety. . . . This story has needed to be told.” —Andrew Solomon, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Noonday Demon\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Enlightening, empowering. . . . Brave and . . . potentially therapeutic.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Sheds light not just on a particular disorder but on the human condition that gives rise to it.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Wall Street Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Brings to this story depth, intelligence, and perspective that could enlighten untold fellow sufferers for years to come.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, author of \u003ci\u003eEat, Pray, Love\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“A carefully reported, wryly funny, and admirably honest historical and personal investigation.” —\u003ci\u003eElle\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “[An] erudite, heartfelt, and occasionally darkly funny meld of memoir, cultural history, and science. . . . Excruciatingly relevant.” —\u003ci\u003eO, The Oprah Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Bravely intimate. . . . Dazzlingly comprehensive.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Admirably done. . . . Intelligent, interesting, and well written.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “First-rate. . . . Fascinating. . . . [A] triumph.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Boston Globe\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “There is much pain here, but humor, too. . . . Without meaning to, Stossel has written a self-help manual.” —\u003ci\u003eNewsday\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Quite impressive. . . . [Stossel is] a terrific, companionable writer.” —\u003ci\u003eForbes\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“With humor, insight and intense research, [Stossel] sheds light on the disorder that is believed to affect one in seven Americans. From a historical overview to a review of current treatments in a book laced with fascinating personal anecdotes, Stossel delivers authentic perspective on such suffering. “ —\u003ci\u003eNew York Daily News\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Scott Stossel’s new book on his lifelong struggle with severe anxiety is outstanding in the fullest sense of the word. . . . Both conspicuous and superior within its genre.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Seattle Times\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Books exploring personal experiences of mental illness tend to be either over-wrought accounts of personal trauma that shed little light on the world beyond the author’s nose, or the more detached observations of scientists and medics. It is rare to find works that bridge these objectives, which is one reason that the writer Andrew Solomon achieved such success with \u003ci\u003eThe Noonday Demon\u003c\/i\u003e. . . . Stossel’s book deserves a place on this higher shelf.” —\u003ci\u003eNature\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Powerful, eye-opening and funny. Pitch-perfect in his storytelling, Stossel reminds us that, in many important ways, to be anxious is to be human.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Dallas Morning News\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “An immense achievement. . . . Superbly wide-ranging. . . . With this substantial treatment, Stossel has done justice to himself and his subject.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Daily Telegraph\u003c\/i\u003e (London) \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “An extraordinary literary performance. . . . In an age inundated by memoirs and psychic self-help books, \u003ci\u003eMy Age of Anxiety\u003c\/i\u003e is the rare memoir that tells an entirely compelling story, and the rare self-help book that really helps. You, and many thousands of readers along with you, will laugh until you cry.” —\u003ci\u003eBookforum\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cp\u003eSCOTT STOSSEL is the editor of \u003ci\u003eThe Atlantic\u003c\/i\u003e and the author of \u003ci\u003eSarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver.\u003c\/i\u003e His articles and essays have appeared in \u003ci\u003eThe Atlantic,The New Yorker, The New Republic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, \u003c\/i\u003eand many other publications. He lives with his family in Washington, D.C.\u003c\/p\u003eSome eighty years ago, Freud proposed that anxiety was \"a riddle  whose solution would be bound to throw a flood of light on our whole  mental existence.\" Unlocking the mysteries of anxiety, he believed,  would go far in helping us to unravel the mysteries of the mind:  consciousness, the self, identity, intellect, imagination, creativity —  not to mention pain, suffering, hope, and regret. To grapple with and  understand anxiety is, in some sense, to grapple with and understand the  human condition.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The differences in how various cultures  and eras have perceived and understood anxiety can tell us a lot about  those cultures and eras. Why did the ancient Greeks of the Hippocratic  school see anxiety mainly as a medical condition, while Enlightenment  philosophers saw it as an intellectual problem? Why did the early  existentialists see anxiety as a spiritual condition, while Gilded Age  doctors saw it as a specifically Anglo-Saxon stress response — a  response that they believed spared Catholic societies — to the  Industrial Revolution? Why did the early Freudians see anxiety as a  psychological condition emanating from sexual inhibition, whereas our  own age tends to see it, once again, as a medical and neurochemical  condition, a problem of malfunctioning biomechanics?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Do  these shifting interpretations represent the forward march of progress  and science? Or simply the changing, and often cyclical, ways in which  cultures work? What does it say about the societies in question that  Americans showing up in emergency rooms with panic attacks tend to  believe they're having heart attacks, whereas Japanese tend to be afraid  they're going to faint? Are the Iranians who complain of what they call  \"heart distress\" suffering what Western psychiatrists would call panic  attacks? Are the \u003ci\u003eataques de nervios\u003c\/i\u003e experienced by South  Americans simply panic attacks with a Latino inflection — or are they,  as modern researchers now believe, a distinct cultural and medical  syndrome? Why do drug treatments for anxiety that work so well on  Americans and the French seem not to work effectively on the Chinese?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e As  fascinating and multifarious as these cultural idiosyncrasies are, the  underlying consistency of experience across time and cultures speaks to  the universality of anxiety as a human trait. Even filtered through the  distinctive cultural practices and beliefs of the Greenland Inuit a  hundred years ago, the syndrome the Inuit called \"kayak angst\" (those  afflicted by it were afraid to go out seal hunting alone) appears to be  little different from what we today call agoraphobia. In Hippocrates's  ancient writings can be found clinical descriptions of pathological  anxiety that sound quite modern. One of his patients was terrified of  cats (simple phobia, which today would be coded 300.29 for insurance  purposes, according to the classifications of the fifth edition of the \u003ci\u003eDiagnostic and Statistical Manual\u003c\/i\u003e, the \u003ci\u003eDSM-V\u003c\/i\u003e)  and another of nightfall; a third, Hippocrates reported, was \"beset by  terror\" whenever he heard a flute; a fourth could not walk alongside  \"even the shallowest ditch,\" though he had no problem walking \u003ci\u003einside\u003c\/i\u003e the ditch — evidence of what we would today call acrophobia, the fear  of heights. Hippocrates also describes a patient suffering what would  likely be called, in modern diagnostic terminology, panic disorder with  agoraphobia (\u003ci\u003eDSM-V\u003c\/i\u003e code 300.22): the condition, as Hippocrates  described it, \"usually attacks abroad, if a person is travelling a  lonely road somewhere, and fear seizes him.\" The syndromes described by  Hippocrates are recognizably the same clinical phenomena described in  the latest issues of the \u003ci\u003eArchives of General Psychiatry\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eBulletin of the Menninger Clinic\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Their  similarities bridge the yawning gap of millennia and circumstances that  separate them, providing a sense of how, for all the differences in  culture and setting, the physiologically anxious aspects of human  experience may be universal.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e In this book, I have set out  to explore the \"riddle\" of anxiety. I am not a doctor, a psychologist, a  sociologist, or a historian of science — any one of whom would bring  more scholarly authority to a treatise on anxiety than I do. This is a  work of synthesis and reportage, yoking together explorations of the  idea of anxiety from history, literature, philosophy, religion, popular  culture, and the latest scientific research — all of that woven through  something about which I can, alas, claim extensive expertise: my own  experience with anxiety. Examining the depths of my own neuroses may  seem the height of narcissism (and studies do show that  self-preoccupation tends to be tied to anxiety), but it's an exercise  with worthy antecedents. In 1621, the Oxford scholar Robert Burton  published his canonical \u003ci\u003eThe Anatomy of Melancholy\u003c\/i\u003e, a staggering  thirteen-hundred-page work of synthesis, whose torrents of scholarly  exegesis only partially obscure what it really is: a massive litany of  anxious, depressive complaint. In 1733, George Cheyne, a prominent  London physician and one of the most influential psychological thinkers  of the eighteenth century, published \u003ci\u003eThe English Malady\u003c\/i\u003e, which  includes the forty-page chapter \"The Case of the Author\" (dedicated to  \"my fellow sufferers\"), in which he reports in minute detail on his  neuroses (including \"Fright, Anxiety, Dread, and Terror\" and \"a  melancholy Fright and Panick, where my Reason was of no Use to me\") and  physical symptoms (including \"a sudden violent Head-ach,\" \"extream  Sickness in my Stomach,\" and \"a constant Colick, and an ill Taste and  Savour in my Mouth\") over the years. More recently, the intellectual  odysseys of Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, and William James were  powerfully driven by their curiosity about, and the desire to find  relief from, their own anxious suffering. Freud used his acute train  phobia and his hypochondria, among other things, to construct his theory  of psychoanalysis; Darwin was effectively housebound by stress-related  illnesses after the voyage of the \u003ci\u003eBeagle\u003c\/i\u003e — he spent years in  pursuit of relief from his anxiety, visiting spas and, on the advice of  one doctor, encasing himself in ice. James tried to keep his phobias  hidden from the public but was often quietly terrified. \"I awoke morning  after morning with a horrible dread in the pit of my stomach and with a  sense of insecurity of life that I never knew before,\" he wrote in 1902  of the onset of his anxiety. \"For months, I was unable to go out in the  dark alone.\"\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eUnlike Darwin, Freud, and James, I'm not  out to adumbrate a whole new theory of mind or of human nature. Rather,  this book is motivated by a quest to understand, and to find relief from  or redemption in, anxious suffering. This quest has taken me both  backward, into history, and forward, to the frontiers of modern  scientific research. I have spent much of the past eight years reading  through hundreds of thousands of the pages that have been written about  anxiety over the last three thousand years.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e My life has,  thankfully, lacked great tragedy or melodrama. I haven't served any jail  time. I haven't been to rehab. I haven't assaulted anyone or carried  out a suicide attempt. I haven't woken up naked in the middle of a  field, sojourned in a crack house, or been fired from a job for erratic  behavior. As psychopathologies go, mine has been — so far, most of the  time, to outward appearances — quiet. Robert Downey Jr. will not be  starring in the movie of my life. I am, as they say in the clinical  literature, \"high functioning\" for someone with an anxiety disorder or a  mental illness; I'm usually quite good at hiding it. More than a few  people, some of whom think they know me quite well, have remarked that  they are struck that I, who can seem so even-keeled and imperturbable,  would choose to write a book about anxiety. I smile gently while  churning inside and thinking about what I've learned is a signature  characteristic of the phobic personality: \"the need and ability\" — as  described in the self-help book \u003ci\u003eYour Phobia\u003c\/i\u003e — \"to present a relatively placid, untroubled appearance to others, while suffering extreme distress on the inside.\" *\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eTo  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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e *\u003ci\u003e \"For many, many people who have anxiety  disorders — particularly agoraphobia and panic disorder — people would  be surprised to find out that they have problems with anxiety because  they seem so'together' and in control,\" says Paul Foxman, a psychologist  who heads the Center for Anxiety Disorders in Burlington, Vermont.  \"They seem to be comfortable, but there's a disconnection between the  public self and the private self.\"\u003c\/i\u003e","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303684493541,"sku":"NP9780307390608","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780307390608.jpg?v=1767733206","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/my-age-of-anxiety-isbn-9780307390608","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}