News Updates from the Edge
All the cool kids have anxiety disorders these days. I’m not claiming that this makes me one of them. Correlation, as we all know, does not imply causation, and I am reliably informed that the cool kids also understand Snapchat, wear floral jumpsuits, and know how to talk to people they fancy without pulling a face like a spaniel on acid. Nevertheless, if depression was the definitive diagnosis of the 1990s, anxiety is the mental health epidemic that makes the modern world what it is: overwhelmed, unstable, and in serious need of a decade-long lie down.
The ubiquity of anxiety disorders would shock anyone who hadn’t watched the news lately and understood quite how much most of us have to worry about. Nearly one in five American adults over the age of thirteen suffer from an anxiety disorder, with women twice as likely to be affected. Depression, anxiety, and related disorders have increased in the decade since the financial crash, and we can’t blame it all on Big Pharma. In June, New York Times writer Alex Williams sized up a slew of anxiety memoirs atop the bestseller lists and noted that “Prozac Nation Is Now the United States of Xanax.”
If dealing with your anxiety is now a lifestyle trend, talking about your anxiety is a publishing trend. Part of the reason that memoirs by professionally neurotic authors are now so bankable is that the last best job of a writer is to make the anxieties of the age beautiful, comprehensible and, if possible, lucrative. It helps that many of them—like Kat Kinsman’s Hi, Anxiety and Andrea Petersen’s On Edge: A Journey Through Anxiety—are also deliciously well-written. Anxiety, unlike depression, is exciting to write about, in part because it is a condition in which absolutely everything is suddenly way too exciting. This, by coincidence, is also a neat description of the geopolitics of the chaotic adolescence of the twenty-first century. In the immortal words of Horse ebooks: “Everything happens so much.”
The problem is both profound and profoundly modern. The problem, specifically, is that a lot of us are pretty freaked out pretty much all the time, and whether or not we’ve good reasons for it, the condition of constant panic is debilitating. Despite the rash of articles suggesting a novel condition known as “Trump-related anxiety,” this is a problem far bigger than the presidency. The gurning batrachian monster that crawled out of the mordant id of mass society to squat in the Oval Office was a symptom of our collective neurosis before he was a cause.
“Each phase of capitalism,” according to the activist collective Plan C,
In his forthcoming book Kids These Days, Malcolm Harris draws on a body of psychological research to observe:
If anything, nearly two decades into the new millennium, everything feels a little too real. In place of predictable consumerist anhedonia, instead of the blithe horizon of cardboard cut-out suburban security, reality has come back with a mouthful of razors ready to rip open the throats of anyone pretending they know what’s coming.
This age of anxiety did not begin with this presidency, nor does it end at the U.S. border, but there is something fundamentally Yankish about the culture of dogged, dead-eyed competition that produces it. It’s what happens when the American Dream becomes a nightmare you can’t wake from, and not just because you haven’t had a proper night’s sleep in years. It’s what happens when a society clings to a defining mythos that celebrates working until you drop, abhors poverty as evidence of moral failure, considers the provision of a basic safety net a pansy European affectation, and continues to call itself free.
Mental health is invariably political, even if the first available solutions are individual. Anxiety keeps us ready for a fight-or-flight response in a society that has all but outlawed both flight and fight. Today’s anxiety memoirists, in particular, are attached to the understanding of anxiety as a disorder with only a tangential relationship to real-world events. There is a focus on “raising awareness” of the condition, as if awareness by itself were any sort of answer. Those of us who live with anxiety have more awareness than we know what to do with, including of how our own brains can ambush us with the sudden black anticipation of imminent death. Knowing that you might at any point be incapacitated by panic is not a restful prospect for anyone who has been there. On top of your deadlines, your debts, and the crawling curiosity about which will fall apart first, your life plans or western civilization, you now also have to deal with being crazy.
But just because you’re crazy doesn’t mean you’re wrong. The problem is not that a very large number of us are very worried almost all the time; it is, rather, that there are an awful lot of things to worry about. This is true both at the micro level—how will you ever pay off the debts you ran up earning those qualifications you were told you needed for that job you can’t get?—and at the macro level, where we peek through our fingers at the wildfires and war refugees on the news and wonder if it’s worth starting any long books. Constant concern may be unhealthy, but it is not illogical. Of course, I would say that. I have an anxiety disorder.
On the other hand, simply recognizing that your fears are abundantly founded doesn’t make you less unwell—and choosing not to manage your anxiety is hardly an efficient way of enacting social change. No reputable shrink can write you a prescription for the psycho-social symptoms of late capitalism in its current form, and structural solutions for chronic despairing precarity are not available in over-the-counter form. But people still need to get up and go to work in the morning, whether or not it terrifies us. So what are we supposed to do?
The Organizing Cure
Well, we can always go shopping. The cultural response to this ambient panic can be measured in the desperate mood of wish-fulfillment we see in the sprawling market for emotionally stabilizing sloganeering and interior design. There is, for instance, a bewildering number of throw-pillows currently on sale begging for “good vibes only.” The aesthetics of pop culture are washed in a frantic blush-pastel color scheme, all seafoam green and soothing “millennial pink” and bare stripped-down minimalism, as if we’re desperate to decorate our box-room apartments like the inside of a psychiatric ward. And then there’s the pop culture meme that refuses to die—the endless regurgitation on T-shirts and tea towels and pocket pill-cutters of the cheesy Blitz-era slogan “keep calm and carry on,” as if either approach were a remotely appropriate response to the mounting crises that are engulfing the common weal. The last thing any of us needs to do is keep calm.
All the cool kids have anxiety disorders these days. I’m not claiming that this makes me one of them. Correlation, as we all know, does not imply causation, and I am reliably informed that the cool kids also understand Snapchat, wear floral jumpsuits, and know how to talk to people they fancy without pulling a face like a spaniel on acid. Nevertheless, if depression was the definitive diagnosis of the 1990s, anxiety is the mental health epidemic that makes the modern world what it is: overwhelmed, unstable, and in serious need of a decade-long lie down.
The ubiquity of anxiety disorders would shock anyone who hadn’t watched the news lately and understood quite how much most of us have to worry about. Nearly one in five American adults over the age of thirteen suffer from an anxiety disorder, with women twice as likely to be affected. Depression, anxiety, and related disorders have increased in the decade since the financial crash, and we can’t blame it all on Big Pharma. In June, New York Times writer Alex Williams sized up a slew of anxiety memoirs atop the bestseller lists and noted that “Prozac Nation Is Now the United States of Xanax.”
If dealing with your anxiety is now a lifestyle trend, talking about your anxiety is a publishing trend. Part of the reason that memoirs by professionally neurotic authors are now so bankable is that the last best job of a writer is to make the anxieties of the age beautiful, comprehensible and, if possible, lucrative. It helps that many of them—like Kat Kinsman’s Hi, Anxiety and Andrea Petersen’s On Edge: A Journey Through Anxiety—are also deliciously well-written. Anxiety, unlike depression, is exciting to write about, in part because it is a condition in which absolutely everything is suddenly way too exciting. This, by coincidence, is also a neat description of the geopolitics of the chaotic adolescence of the twenty-first century. In the immortal words of Horse ebooks: “Everything happens so much.”The problem is both profound and profoundly modern. The problem, specifically, is that a lot of us are pretty freaked out pretty much all the time, and whether or not we’ve good reasons for it, the condition of constant panic is debilitating. Despite the rash of articles suggesting a novel condition known as “Trump-related anxiety,” this is a problem far bigger than the presidency. The gurning batrachian monster that crawled out of the mordant id of mass society to squat in the Oval Office was a symptom of our collective neurosis before he was a cause.
“Each phase of capitalism,” according to the activist collective Plan C,
has a particular affect which holds it together. . . . Today’s public secret is that everyone is anxious. Anxiety has spread from its previous localized locations—such as sexuality—to the whole of the social field. All forms of intensity, self-expression, emotional connection, immediacy, and enjoyment are now laced with anxiety. It has become the linchpin of subordination.Anxiety may be a logical response to overwhelming stress and insecurity, but it is also a very easy way to keep people isolated, cowed, and compliant. Existing in a state of constant agitation is unpleasant, but it is also useful. Anxious people get things done—at least up to a certain point, at which productivity rapidly plummets in a condition known euphemistically as “burnout,” “stress,” or “complete and utter wall-gnawing, corner-scuttling, gibbering breakdown.”
One major part of the social underpinning of anxiety is the multi-faceted omnipresent web of surveillance. The NSA, CCTV, performance management reviews, the Job Centre, the privileges system in the prisons, the constant examination and classification of the youngest schoolchildren. But this obvious web is only the outer carapace. We need to think about the ways in which a neoliberal idea of success inculcates these surveillance mechanisms inside the subjectivities and life-stories of most of the population. . . . We are failing to escape the generalized production of anxiety.
In his forthcoming book Kids These Days, Malcolm Harris draws on a body of psychological research to observe:
Given what we know about recent changes in the American sociocultural environment, it would be a surprise if there weren’t elevated levels of anxiety among young people. Their lives center around production, competition, surveillance, and achievement in ways that were totally exceptional only a few decades ago. All this striving, all this trying to catch up and stay ahead—it simply has to have psychological consequences. The symptoms of anxiety aren’t just the unforeseen and unfortunate outcome of increased productivity and decreased labor costs; they’re useful. . . . Restlessness, dissatisfaction and instability—which Millennials report experiencing more than generations past—are negative ways of framing the flexibility and self-direction employers increasingly demand. . . . All of these psychopathologies are the result of adaptive developments. (...)Reality Bites Back
If anything, nearly two decades into the new millennium, everything feels a little too real. In place of predictable consumerist anhedonia, instead of the blithe horizon of cardboard cut-out suburban security, reality has come back with a mouthful of razors ready to rip open the throats of anyone pretending they know what’s coming.
This age of anxiety did not begin with this presidency, nor does it end at the U.S. border, but there is something fundamentally Yankish about the culture of dogged, dead-eyed competition that produces it. It’s what happens when the American Dream becomes a nightmare you can’t wake from, and not just because you haven’t had a proper night’s sleep in years. It’s what happens when a society clings to a defining mythos that celebrates working until you drop, abhors poverty as evidence of moral failure, considers the provision of a basic safety net a pansy European affectation, and continues to call itself free.
Mental health is invariably political, even if the first available solutions are individual. Anxiety keeps us ready for a fight-or-flight response in a society that has all but outlawed both flight and fight. Today’s anxiety memoirists, in particular, are attached to the understanding of anxiety as a disorder with only a tangential relationship to real-world events. There is a focus on “raising awareness” of the condition, as if awareness by itself were any sort of answer. Those of us who live with anxiety have more awareness than we know what to do with, including of how our own brains can ambush us with the sudden black anticipation of imminent death. Knowing that you might at any point be incapacitated by panic is not a restful prospect for anyone who has been there. On top of your deadlines, your debts, and the crawling curiosity about which will fall apart first, your life plans or western civilization, you now also have to deal with being crazy.
But just because you’re crazy doesn’t mean you’re wrong. The problem is not that a very large number of us are very worried almost all the time; it is, rather, that there are an awful lot of things to worry about. This is true both at the micro level—how will you ever pay off the debts you ran up earning those qualifications you were told you needed for that job you can’t get?—and at the macro level, where we peek through our fingers at the wildfires and war refugees on the news and wonder if it’s worth starting any long books. Constant concern may be unhealthy, but it is not illogical. Of course, I would say that. I have an anxiety disorder.
On the other hand, simply recognizing that your fears are abundantly founded doesn’t make you less unwell—and choosing not to manage your anxiety is hardly an efficient way of enacting social change. No reputable shrink can write you a prescription for the psycho-social symptoms of late capitalism in its current form, and structural solutions for chronic despairing precarity are not available in over-the-counter form. But people still need to get up and go to work in the morning, whether or not it terrifies us. So what are we supposed to do?
The Organizing Cure
Well, we can always go shopping. The cultural response to this ambient panic can be measured in the desperate mood of wish-fulfillment we see in the sprawling market for emotionally stabilizing sloganeering and interior design. There is, for instance, a bewildering number of throw-pillows currently on sale begging for “good vibes only.” The aesthetics of pop culture are washed in a frantic blush-pastel color scheme, all seafoam green and soothing “millennial pink” and bare stripped-down minimalism, as if we’re desperate to decorate our box-room apartments like the inside of a psychiatric ward. And then there’s the pop culture meme that refuses to die—the endless regurgitation on T-shirts and tea towels and pocket pill-cutters of the cheesy Blitz-era slogan “keep calm and carry on,” as if either approach were a remotely appropriate response to the mounting crises that are engulfing the common weal. The last thing any of us needs to do is keep calm.
by Laurie Penny, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Shreya Chopra
