Ubiquitous anxiety

Alternet - According to the latest figures from the National Institute of Mental Health, some 40 million Americans, or about 18 percent of the population, currently suffer from a clinical anxiety disorder. Recent editions of Stress in America, a report produced each year by the American Psychological Association, have found a badly “overstressed nation,” in which a majority of Americans describe themselves as “moderately” or “highly” stressed, with significant percentages of them reporting stress-related physical symptoms such as fatigue, headache, stomach troubles, muscle tension, and teeth grinding. Between 2002 and 2006, the number of Americans seeking medical treatment for anxiety increased from 13.4 million to 16.2 million. More Americans seek medical treatment for anxiety than for back pain or migraine headaches.

Surveys by the Anxiety and Depression Association of America find that nearly half of all Americans report “persistent or excessive anxiety” in their daily work lives. (Other surveys find that 3 out of 4 Americans believe there’s more workplace stress today than in the past.) A study published in the American Psychologist found that 40 percent more people said they’d felt an impending nervous breakdown in 1996 than had said so in 1957. Twice as many people reported experiencing symptoms of panic attacks in 1995 as in 1980. According to a national survey of incoming freshmen, the anxiety levels of college students are higher today than at any time in the 25-year history of the survey. When Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, looked at survey data from 50,000 children and college students between the 1950s and the 1990s, she found that the average college student in the 1990s was more anxious than 85 percent of students in the 1950s and that “‘normal’ schoolchildren in the 1980s reported higher levels of anxiety than child psychiatric patients in the 1950s.” The baby boomers were more anxious than their parents; Generation X was more anxious than the boomers; the millennials are turning out to be more anxious than Generation X.

Rates of anxiety seem to be increasing all around the world. A World Health Organization survey of 18 countries concluded that anxiety disorders are now the most common mental illness, once again overtaking depression. Statistics from the National Health Service reveal that British hospitals treated four times as many people for anxiety disorders in 2011 as they did in 2007, while issuing record numbers of tranquilizer prescriptions. A report published by Britain’s Mental Health Foundation in 2009 concluded that a “culture of fear”—marked by a shaky economy and hyperbolic threat-mongering by politicians and the media—had produced “record levels of anxiety” in Great Britain.