num_pages: 416
description: A riveting revelatory and moving account of the authors 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 Sren 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 emotions 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 anxietys human tollits crippling impact its devastating power to paralyzewhile 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.
language: English
title: My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind
publisher: Knopf