My Age of Anxiety by Scott Stossel

My Age of Anxiety by Scott Stossel

A riveting, revelatory, and moving account of the author's struggles with anxiety, and of the history of efforts by scientists, philosophers, and writers to understand the condition

As recently as thirty-five years ago, anxiety did not exist as a diagnostic category. Today, it is the most common form of officially classified mental illness. Scott Stossel gracefully guides us across the terrain of an affliction that is pervasive yet too often misunderstood.

Drawing on his own long-standing battle with anxiety, Stossel presents an astonishing history, at once intimate and authoritative, of the efforts to understand the condition from medical, cultural, philosophical, and experiential perspectives. He ranges from the earliest medical reports of Galen and Hippocrates, through later observations by Robert Burton and S ren Kierkegaard, to the investigations by great nineteenth-century scientists, such as Charles Darwin, William James, and Sigmund Freud, as they began to explore its sources and causes, to the latest research by neuroscientists and geneticists. Stossel reports on famous individuals who struggled with anxiety, as well as on the afflicted generations of his own family. His portrait of anxiety reveals not only the emotion's myriad manifestations and the anguish anxiety produces but also the countless psychotherapies, medications, and other (often outlandish) treatments that have been developed to counteract it. Stossel vividly depicts anxiety's human toll--its crippling impact, its devastating power to paralyze--while at the same time exploring how those who suffer from it find ways to manage and control it.
My Age of Anxiety is learned and empathetic, humorous and inspirational, offering the reader great insight into the biological, cultural, and environmental factors that contribute to the affliction.

The Atlantic's Scott Stossel is the editor and author of Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver. His writings and articles have appeared in a variety of journals, including The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New Republic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and others. In Washington, D.C., he lives with his family.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780307390608
ISBN 10	0307390608
Title	My Age of Anxiety
Author	Scott Stossel
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Random House USA Inc
Year published	2015-02-03
Number of pages	416
Prizes	Short-listed for Wellcome Trust Book Prize 2015
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.