These are anxious times – one in five Britons suffer from some form of anxiety disorder. We examine what makes everyday stresses spiral out of control, and four writers reveal how their fears rule their lives
Anxiety plagues our times. In the UK, 19% of people suffer from depression and anxiety, according to the Office for National Statistics. Forty million Americans have an anxiety disorder; the average age of onset is 11. The disorders range from the generalised (GAD) to the unsettlingly specific: the pulling out of hair, compulsive skin-picking and, among the Inuit people of west Greenland, kayak angst. There is an anxiety for everyone.
Anxiety, says Scott Stossel, the author of My Age of Anxiety, “has become part of the cultural furniture”. This helps to explain why Karl Ove Knausgaard sells so well, why so many characters in TV dramas and popular fiction have OCD (see Hannah in Girls, JK Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy, Monk) and why, eight years after the slogan was first popularised, people still drink out of Keep Calm and Carry On mugs. From Daniel Smith’s Monkey Mind to Eleanor Morgan’s Anxiety For Beginners, the anxiety memoir is the new misery memoir. Talent is no defence against this disorder. Stossel edits the Atlantic. Panic unites those as diverse as the director Michael Bay and the vlogger Zoella.
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