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Title details for My Age of Anxiety by Scott Stossel - Available

My Age of Anxiety

Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind

by Scott Stossel
Michael Goldstrom
Audiobook
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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 Søren 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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Awards

  • Release date

    January 7, 2014

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780804148917
      • File size: 451665 KB
      • Duration: 15:40:58

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from February 24, 2014
      Veteran magazine editor Stossel fuses his own account of lifelong chronic anxiety with a medical history of this baffling psychiatric condition that plagues an increasingly larger percentage of the population even as the range of available treatment options has become more varied. Narrator Goldstrom takes great pains to adopt Stossel’s journalist/insider identity in his delivery, conveying genuine emotion, but muting his tone enough to keep the production from emphasizing the personal at the expense of the larger scientific and societal issues. Still, Goldstrom’s rendering of some of Stossel’s autobiographical anecdotes do stand out as dramatic, particularly his therapeutic session to conquer phobia related to vomiting, as well as a panic attack involving a series of misadventures in a guest bathroom at the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis Port, Mass. Goldstrom also does an especially effective job reading the pharmacological and psychological portions of the narrative in a smooth broadcasting style that helps make the material more accessible and engaging. A Knopf hardcover.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      October 21, 2013
      Stossel, editor of the Atlantic, leads a jittery, searching tour through the most common mental disorder in the world: “a function of biology and philosophy, body and mind, instinct and reason, personality and culture.” As an acutely miserable and anxious 10-year old, Stossel began an early journey through various therapies and medications. His experiences with these treatments doubles as an accidental history of how science, psychotherapy, medicine, and the culture at large have attempted deal with anxiety’s psychological riddle: persistent fear with no “concrete object” of which to be afraid. Stossel’s work features biographical sketches of famous anxiety cases like Charles Darwin and Samuel Johnson, and a rigorous survey of the foundations of anxiety research, from Freud to attachment theory to the “chemical imbalance” model of mental illness, alongside discussions of the biological, neurological, and genetic roots of the condition. Stossel’s journey through his own life is unsparing, darkly funny (a nervous stomach tends to flare up at the worst times, like in front of JFK Jr.), but above all, hopeful. As with many sufferers, Stossel’s quest to find relief is unfinished, but his book relays a masterful understanding of the condition he and millions of others endure. Agent: the Wylie Agency.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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