Scott Stossel has tried almost every treatment available for his Anxiety, from drugs to yoga. Nothing has worked.
People don’t ordinarily self-medicate by writing a Book, but “My Age of Anxiety” is an attempt at recovery by a man whom modern psychiatry has failed. The man is Scott Stossel, a successful journalist, now in his forties, who has suffered all his life from an acute anxiety disorder.
When he was a child, he had terrible separation anxiety; as he grew up, he acquired phobias about public speaking, flying, fainting, heights, closed spaces, germs, vomiting, and cheese.
Many people have an aversion to those thing, and, given the option, go out of their way to avoid them. But, faced with the prospect of a plane trip or a speaking engagement or sometimes even a squash match or a meeting at the office, Stossel experiences full-blown panic: insomnia, sweating, vertigo, stomach pains, and loss of control of his bowels. The sight of an unfamiliar pimple can send him down a bottomless chute of dread. He nearly passed out at his own wedding.
Stossel has been in therapy since he was ten and consumed many psycho-pharmaceuticals -Thorazine, Nardil, Prozak, Zoloft, Paxil, Liberium, Klonopin and a dozen more. Some of those drugs have tempered his symptoms, but the respite didn't last long.
My Age of Anxiety is not a memoir. Stossel tells us things about his parents, his marriage, and his children, but only things that are relevant to what he calls, after a famous remark of Freud’s, “the ‘riddle’ of anxiety.” The same is true of what he tells us about himself. He appears simply as a sufferer. Most of his book is a exploration of the history of anxiety and a journalistic account of the present state of medical knowledge. It’s intelligent, interesting, and well written, but the subject of anxiety is a mess, and the book, intentionally or not, is an accurate representation of its subject.
