A riveting, revelatory, and moving accounts from the author’s challenges with anxiety, and of the history of efforts by researchers, philosophers, and writers to understand the condition

As recently as thirty-five years back, anxiety did not exist like a diagnostic category. Today, it is the most common form of officially categorized mental disease. Scott Stossel gracefully manuals us across the terrain of the affliction that is pervasive yet all too often misunderstood.

Drawing by himself long- about My Age group of Nervousness: Fear, Wish, Dread, as well as the Search for Satisfaction standing battle with panic, Stossel presents an astonishing history, simultaneously close and authoritative, from the efforts to comprehend the condition from medical, ethnic, philosophical, and experiential perspectives. He ranges from the initial medical reviews of Galen and Hippocrates, through afterwards observations by Robert Burton and Søren Kierkegaard, towards the investigations by great nineteenth-century researchers, such as for example Charles Darwin, William James, and Sigmund Freud, because they begun to explore its sources and causes, to the most recent study by neuroscientists and geneticists. Stossel reviews on famous people who battled with anxiousness, as well as in the afflicted years of his personal family. His portrait of stress reveals not only the emotion’s myriad manifestations as well as the anguish stress and anxiety produces but also the countless psychotherapies, medications, and additional (often outlandish) treatments that have been developed to counteract it. Stossel vividly depicts anxiety’s human toll-its crippling effect, its devastating capacity to paralyze-while at the same time exploring how those who suffer from it find ways to manage and control it.

My Age group of Anxiety is normally learned and empathetic, funny and inspirational, providing the reader great insight into the biological, social, and environmental factors that contribute to the affliction.