Anxiety disorders have become ubiquitous in contemporary life, to the point that anxiety and the medications used to treat it have become part of the cultural landscape. With the pace of technological change having hastened, and the structure of traditional rituals, which once conferred a sense of place and purpose, evaporating in much of the First World, the result is a civilization of stress and stress-related disorders, with pervasive anxiety as the end product. No such drug has been yet discovered, in spite of many hundreds of millions of dollars in pharmaceutical research, and far more spent by those medicating themselves with drugs both legal and illegal. If such a molecule were to be found, it might be a cure worse than the disease, with the risk that ours might become a world of blunted aspirations and diluted creativity. Indeed, it is the cognitive dulling and dependency associated with the most effective anxiety drugs of our era, benzodiazepines, that leave the bulk of anxiety disorders inadequately treated, if at all.
Anxiety comes in several major varieties.
When it reaches a point where it clearly undermines social or occupational functioning, it is falls under the category of Generalized Anxiety Disorder. Conservatively, between 18 and 25 million Americans suffer from one of these several subtypes of anxiety disorders. For these patients, anxiety has ceased to be a signal for adaptation, it is instead an unshakable burden. Anxiety disorders frequently overlap with other psychiatric conditions, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder and depression. In recent years, the gutting of psychotherapy services by managed care has made nonpharmacological therapies less accessible, many patients instead funneled into drug treatment alone.