Trickle-Down Distress: Growing Anxiety in US

[teflepi]

America is turning into a country of hand-wringers. Nearly one in five of us -- 40 million American adults -- suffer from anxiety disorders, the most common class of psychiatric ailment we have. By comparison, a mere one in ten are plagued with mood disorders like depression, the second most-common class of psychiatric problems. Panic attacks often besiege Daniel Smith, author of the new anxiety memoir Monkey Mind, out July 3, while others suffer from generalized anxiety disorder, persistent and excessive worrying about everyday things; social anxiety disorder; and a host of other fretful conditions.

So we're more anxious than anything else -- and also more anxious than anyone else, beating out all other nations in our race to the top of the nerve-racked list. According to a recent World Health Organization study, 31 percent of Americans are likely to suffer from an anxiety problem at some point during their lifetimes -- compared to 25.3 percent of those in Colombia, and 24.6 percent in New Zealand, the countries that rank second and third. You'd think people in developing or unstable states -- those preoccupied with concerns farther down on the Maslow Scale -- would be more anxious than we are. Not so. "According to the 2002 World Mental Health Survey, people in developing-world countries such as Nigeria are up to five times less likely to show clinically significant anxiety levels than Americans, despite having more basic life-necessities to worry about," writes Taylor Clark, author of Nerve: Poise Under Pressure, Serenity Under Stress, and the Brave New Science of Fear and Cool. "What's more, when these less-anxious developing-world citizens emigrate to the United States, they tend to get just as anxious as Americans.

www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/07/trickle-down-distress-how-americas-broken-meritocracy-drives-our-national-anxiety-epidemic/259383/

[ttt]

I definitely can see this. We are set up to fail in so many ways, and then our culture has a unique way of blaming individuals for that failure. Our culture promotes the myth that anyone can succeed financially and work their way to the top even if they were born into poverty, and then when they don't (because it's a myth and the vast majority of people will never rise above where they were born) we don't look at structural reasons why, we blame them because they obviously didn't work hard enough and aren't deserving. Everything in our society is set up to make people overweight and obese and unhealthy, from car-dependent cities and a lack of public transit to constant food advertisements and an abudance of crappy food, working long hours that makes preparing healthy food difficult - but when people inevitably do get fat, we jeer at them and blame them for not eating right and exercising and for "letting themselves go." We're supposed to get an education and go to college so that we can get good jobs, but then it's our own fault for having huge student loans and not being able to get jobs that let us pay them off because why didn't we all become engineers??? We're supposed to move to wherever the jobs are, but then that leaves us without social support of family and friends.

And we wonder why everyone is so anxious??

[sporky]

I really wish I could like ttt's post more than once!