The age of your friends' anxiety

The author of the New York magazine piece "Listening to Xanax" declares this the age of anxiety and, therefore, of anti-anxiety medication: "If the nineties were the decade of Prozac, all hollow-eyed and depressed, then this is the era of Xanax, all jumpy and edgy and short of breath." How did an editor at a major, reputable publication think something was being said here?

First we learn of a kind of situational (as opposed to compulsive) anxiety:

“Situational anxiety” today stems from threats that are both everywhere and nowhere at once. How will the debtor nations in the eurozone ever manage to pay back what they owe? How can Israel disarm Iran’s nuclear program without inciting the messiest international conflict since World War II? How can you be absolutely, 100 percent sure the cantaloupe you had for lunch wasn’t contaminated with listeria that will make you or your kids or one of your guests deathly sick?

Oh, anxiety can be scary, she confesses, but it also lives this "second life as a more general mind-set and cultural stance, one defined by an obsession with an uncertain future." Nevermind that the future is always uncertain, flashing warning signs up ahead--more to the point, nobody in the society she's talking about has suffered an anxiety attack or even lost a wink of sleep worrying about the kind of macro political and economic issues she describes. Nobody thinks, "Oh, Lord, what's Iran gonna do? I need a Xanax!"

Because this one was so weak, she quickly switches to another intellectually weak premise, focusing now on what is called functional anxiety--something she acknowledges that everyone has and has always had:

But functional anxiety, which afflicts nearly everyone I know, is a murkier thing. Its sufferers gather in places like New York, where relentlessness and impatience are the highest values, and in industries built on unrelenting deadlines and tightrope deals.

This obliterates her initial premise--that there's something unique about this age in terms of anxiety. But she soldiers on. Her sample functionally anxious subject says,

“I use my anxiety to be better at what I do,” says an executive at a boutique PR firm. “A certain amount of anxiety makes me a better employee but a less happy person, and you have to constantly balance that. If I didn’t constantly fear I was about to be fired or outed as a loser, I’m afraid I might be lazy.”

So, her overly dramatic but otherwise mentally healthy, motivated, ambitious, and competitive friends she describes in the language of mental illness. Here, she extinguishes all hope of having made a point: "Not quite a disease, or even a pathology, low-grade anxiety is more like a habit." In other words, something so ordinary I shouldn't have brought it up at all.

And from much ado about nothing, she explores what to do about nothing. First, she briefly describes folks who resist the drug-first approach, completely misconstruing them as shooting to "cure" her successful friends of their healthy habits:

A cure isn’t what the PR executive with the occasional Klonopin habit wants. “My own personal experience is that there’s a healthy level of anxiety, and I don’t believe ‘healthy’ is the absence of anxiety,” she says. “I live in a world that puts unreasonable demands on me, and sometimes I need help. I wish I could do it without the pills, but I can’t.”

Exactly--you're already healthy, and not this imagined poster sufferer in an age of anxiety.

Besides, no one wants to cure you or your stupid friends.

Notes:

• In the meantime, she ignores obvious related issues: differences in drug use by class (and hers is an upper class, to be sure), the history of anxiety and its treatment (in and out of psychology), the rise of diagnoses, the increase in medications and prescriptions, the trend of first prescriptions causing need for a second, exterior sources of existential dread over time, and on and on.

• Worst anecdote she gives: "A friend of mine had dental surgery recently, a procedure she both hates and fears. So proud was she that she’d sworn off Klonopin that she decided to forgo the medication ahead of her dental appointment. “I thought, Don’t be a baby. That’s just weak. You should be able to handle things.” She had a panic attack in the chair and was “a total bitch,” she says, to the dentist. “Oh, wait a second,” she reminded herself as the drill whined and the tooth dust spattered, “there’s a medical reason for these things.” "

• "Its sufferers gather in places like New York"? In places like ... New York?