I hear of even teenagers struggling with this, but most people have financial fear, prices going up, cost of houses skyrocketing, rent and the worry is: will I make it. Some people I know turned to CBD oil instead of addictive pills and are very happy with it.
Behind the rising level of anxiety, a manic push for happiness by the ‘unusually privileged’
People say, 'Well, isn't this an unusually anxiety-provoking time?' I would invite those people to think about what it was like in Nazi Germany'
With new surveys showing alarming rates of anxiety, it’s a wonder we haven’t all crawled under weighted blankets.
A recent poll of 1,500 Canadians found 41 per cent of those surveyed identified themselves as “someone who struggles with anxiety.” A third said they had been formally diagnosed with anxiety. A similar proportion had been prescribed antidepressants.
Last week, a study suggested the election of Donald Trump left so many young people so psychologically traumatized, one-quarter of American college students are at risk of PTSD. “Although U.S. presidential elections occur every four years,” the authors wrote in the Journal of American College Health, “the 2016 election was perhaps the most polarizing and emotionally evocative political event for young people in recent history.”
But have rates of distress and anxiety really changed dramatically in the past years? Is this an unusually anxiety-provoking time, or have we become intolerant of normal bouts of misery, of anything that isn’t happy and positive? And why, if we’re awash in antidepressants, aren’t we less neurotic?
“There’s no question in my mind anxiety levels are increasing,” said Dr. David H. Rosmarin, an assistant professor in the department of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and founder of the Center for Anxiety. Rosmarin believes several cultural factors are setting us up for “emotional decline, en mass” including the almost manic, cultural push for happiness. “Life is about facing challenges, it’s not only about being happy,” Rosmarin said.
“But people are very pain averse. People want to be comfortable and they want to be happy, but if you chase happiness by trying to push aside anything that’s unpleasant and upsetting in your life, the irony is that it actually comes back with a vengeance.”
In the recent survey, conducted by Abacus Data on behalf of Yahoo Canada, 34 per cent of adult men and 47 per cent of women strongly or somewhat agreed that “I consider myself someone who struggles with anxiety.” Among those aged 30 and under, 71 per cent of females reported being anxious, versus 53 per cent of men. Among 18 to 29-year-olds, 63 per cent reported having anxiety.
The survey didn’t ask respondents why they feel so wired. Anxiety disorders can include obsessive-compulsive disorder, panic disorder, agoraphobia, social phobia and generalized anxiety disorder, or GAD, where people worry excessively and uncontrollably, more days than not. Taken together, anxiety disorders are the most prevalent mental disorders, experts say. They’re more common in women and peak during midlife. For some, symptoms wax and wane. In severe cases, people can become seriously functionally impaired.
But it’s difficult to find reliable evidence for a change in prevalence rates for anxiety over the last 10, 50 or even 100 years, researchers reported in 2015 in Dialogues in Clinical Neurosciences. More people are seeking treatment, which may explain why anxiety seems more common. But 30 to 50 per cent of anxiety disorders are heritable, the authors wrote — “and heritable disorders would not change their clinical picture substantially over decades or centuries.”
In Canada, “there is a widely held belief — I personally don’t think it has a strong basis in evidence — that there has been a deterioration in mental health, that there’s more depression or more anxiety afflicting people than has occurred in the past,” said Dr. Scott Patten, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Calgary. “As an epidemiologist, we just haven’t been able to say that in Canada.”
Still, the perception that we’re coming seriously undone has sparked a burgeoning anxiety economy, with “calming” products from anxiety apps and magnetic bracelets and weighted blankets made of glass beads and poly pellets, to, now, recreational pot. Millions of Canadians are also swallowing tranquillizers and Prozac-like antidepressants for anxiety.
The drugs are effective for the severely sick, but not for people whose problems are closer to normal, doctors say. Benzodiazepines like Xanax also come with a high risk of addiction — once on a benzo, it’s very hard to stop — and wildly popular antidepressants known as SSRIs can cause a fierce withdrawal syndrome.
“They put out the fire right away. You take a Xanax you’re going to feel better in a couple of minutes, but you don’t learn to accept the anxiety and deal with it,” Rosmarin said. He’s not anti-medication, “but when you have so many people taking medications what that indicates to me is a mass movement against experiencing any emotional pain.” Instead, he recommends exposure therapy — for example, putting people who experience heart-pounding panic attacks on treadmills to get their heart racing and master the fear they’re going to have a heart attack and die. “It’s a way to get people to face their fear in order to learn at a gut level that they’re going to be OK.”
Rosmarin is particularly concerned about high self-reported rates of anxiety among youth, about the competition and social comparisons. On social media, “Everyone is sizing themselves up against somebody else. ‘Why is everybody so happy and I’m so miserable?’ ” Rosmarin said. Facebook, he said, has done a number on our collective mental health.
“Most of all, frankly, we don’t have the level of adversity we used to,” he said. “In Canada a lot of parents and grandparents are immigrants and they came in and were eating fried potato peels and trying to scrounge and make a buck and sell what they could.
“Now we have a lot of luxuries. We’re not used to facing adversity.”
Others worry that anxiety is being over diagnosed, that we’re medicalizing the normal anxieties of being human.
https://nationalpost.com/news/its-n...-with-anxiety-but-are-we-really-coming-undone
Behind the rising level of anxiety, a manic push for happiness by the ‘unusually privileged’
People say, 'Well, isn't this an unusually anxiety-provoking time?' I would invite those people to think about what it was like in Nazi Germany'
With new surveys showing alarming rates of anxiety, it’s a wonder we haven’t all crawled under weighted blankets.
A recent poll of 1,500 Canadians found 41 per cent of those surveyed identified themselves as “someone who struggles with anxiety.” A third said they had been formally diagnosed with anxiety. A similar proportion had been prescribed antidepressants.
Last week, a study suggested the election of Donald Trump left so many young people so psychologically traumatized, one-quarter of American college students are at risk of PTSD. “Although U.S. presidential elections occur every four years,” the authors wrote in the Journal of American College Health, “the 2016 election was perhaps the most polarizing and emotionally evocative political event for young people in recent history.”
But have rates of distress and anxiety really changed dramatically in the past years? Is this an unusually anxiety-provoking time, or have we become intolerant of normal bouts of misery, of anything that isn’t happy and positive? And why, if we’re awash in antidepressants, aren’t we less neurotic?
“There’s no question in my mind anxiety levels are increasing,” said Dr. David H. Rosmarin, an assistant professor in the department of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and founder of the Center for Anxiety. Rosmarin believes several cultural factors are setting us up for “emotional decline, en mass” including the almost manic, cultural push for happiness. “Life is about facing challenges, it’s not only about being happy,” Rosmarin said.
“But people are very pain averse. People want to be comfortable and they want to be happy, but if you chase happiness by trying to push aside anything that’s unpleasant and upsetting in your life, the irony is that it actually comes back with a vengeance.”
In the recent survey, conducted by Abacus Data on behalf of Yahoo Canada, 34 per cent of adult men and 47 per cent of women strongly or somewhat agreed that “I consider myself someone who struggles with anxiety.” Among those aged 30 and under, 71 per cent of females reported being anxious, versus 53 per cent of men. Among 18 to 29-year-olds, 63 per cent reported having anxiety.
The survey didn’t ask respondents why they feel so wired. Anxiety disorders can include obsessive-compulsive disorder, panic disorder, agoraphobia, social phobia and generalized anxiety disorder, or GAD, where people worry excessively and uncontrollably, more days than not. Taken together, anxiety disorders are the most prevalent mental disorders, experts say. They’re more common in women and peak during midlife. For some, symptoms wax and wane. In severe cases, people can become seriously functionally impaired.
But it’s difficult to find reliable evidence for a change in prevalence rates for anxiety over the last 10, 50 or even 100 years, researchers reported in 2015 in Dialogues in Clinical Neurosciences. More people are seeking treatment, which may explain why anxiety seems more common. But 30 to 50 per cent of anxiety disorders are heritable, the authors wrote — “and heritable disorders would not change their clinical picture substantially over decades or centuries.”
In Canada, “there is a widely held belief — I personally don’t think it has a strong basis in evidence — that there has been a deterioration in mental health, that there’s more depression or more anxiety afflicting people than has occurred in the past,” said Dr. Scott Patten, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Calgary. “As an epidemiologist, we just haven’t been able to say that in Canada.”
Still, the perception that we’re coming seriously undone has sparked a burgeoning anxiety economy, with “calming” products from anxiety apps and magnetic bracelets and weighted blankets made of glass beads and poly pellets, to, now, recreational pot. Millions of Canadians are also swallowing tranquillizers and Prozac-like antidepressants for anxiety.
The drugs are effective for the severely sick, but not for people whose problems are closer to normal, doctors say. Benzodiazepines like Xanax also come with a high risk of addiction — once on a benzo, it’s very hard to stop — and wildly popular antidepressants known as SSRIs can cause a fierce withdrawal syndrome.
“They put out the fire right away. You take a Xanax you’re going to feel better in a couple of minutes, but you don’t learn to accept the anxiety and deal with it,” Rosmarin said. He’s not anti-medication, “but when you have so many people taking medications what that indicates to me is a mass movement against experiencing any emotional pain.” Instead, he recommends exposure therapy — for example, putting people who experience heart-pounding panic attacks on treadmills to get their heart racing and master the fear they’re going to have a heart attack and die. “It’s a way to get people to face their fear in order to learn at a gut level that they’re going to be OK.”
Rosmarin is particularly concerned about high self-reported rates of anxiety among youth, about the competition and social comparisons. On social media, “Everyone is sizing themselves up against somebody else. ‘Why is everybody so happy and I’m so miserable?’ ” Rosmarin said. Facebook, he said, has done a number on our collective mental health.
“Most of all, frankly, we don’t have the level of adversity we used to,” he said. “In Canada a lot of parents and grandparents are immigrants and they came in and were eating fried potato peels and trying to scrounge and make a buck and sell what they could.
“Now we have a lot of luxuries. We’re not used to facing adversity.”
Others worry that anxiety is being over diagnosed, that we’re medicalizing the normal anxieties of being human.
https://nationalpost.com/news/its-n...-with-anxiety-but-are-we-really-coming-undone
