Quotes from Scott Stossel

We all know perfectly well that the man who lives out his life as a consumer," he writes in "The Coming Crisis in Psychiatry," "a sexual partner, an 'other-directed' executive; who avoids boredom and anxiety by consuming tons of newsprint, miles of film, years of TV time; that such a man has somehow betrayed his destiny as a human being.

Researchers at the University of Iowa have for years been studying a woman, known in the literature as S.M., whose amygdala was destroyed by a rare disease—and who cannot, as a consequence, experience fear.)

For the social phobic, any kind of performance—musical, sporting, public speaking—can be terrifying because failure will reveal the weakness and inadequacy within. This in turn means constantly projecting an image that feels false—an image of confidence, competence, even perfection.

The average high school kid today has the same level of anxiety as the average psychiatric patient in the 1950s.")

No wonder I'm anxious: I'm like Woody Allen trapped in John Calvin.

He installed a mirror outside his study window so he could see guests coming up the drive before they saw him, allowing him time to brace himself or to hide.

If I seem unduly preoccupied with Darwin's stomach, perhaps you can understand why. It seems both apt and ironic that the man responsible for launching the modern study of fear—and for identifying it as an emotion with concrete physiological, and especially gastrointestinal, effects—was himself so miserably afflicted by a nervous stomach.

It is an irony of medical history that even as Freud's later work would make him the progenitor of modern psychodynamic psychotherapy, which is generally premised on the idea that mental illness arises from unconscious psychological conflicts, his papers on cocaine make him one of the fathers of biological psychiatry, which is governed by the notion that mental distress is partly caused by a physical or chemical malfunction that can be treated with drugs.

self-preoccupation tends to be tied to anxiety),

If we can't control something, there's no value in fearing it, since the fear accomplishes nothing.)

There are more things to alarm us than to harm us, and we suffer more in apprehension than in reality,

to present a relatively placid, untroubled appearance to others, while suffering extreme distress on the inside."c

species that "fear rightly" increase their chances of survival. We anxious people are less likely to remove ourselves from the gene pool by, say, frolicking on the edge of cliffs or becoming fighter pilots.

Fear sharpens the senses. Anxiety paralyzes them. —KURT GOLDSTEIN, The Organism: A Holistic Approach to Biology (1939)

Studies of the DSM-II found that when two psychiatrists consulted the same patient, they gave the same DSM diagnosis only between 32 and 42 percent of the time. Rates of consistency have improved since then, but the diagnosis of many mental disorders remains, despite pretensions to the contrary, more art than science.b

During high school, I would purposely lose tennis and squash matches to escape the agony of anxiety that competitive situations would provoke in me.

Anxiety and depression also have a shared basis in a feeling of a lack of self-esteem or self-efficacy. (Feeling like you have no control over your life is a common route to both anxiety and depression.) Moreover, reams of studies show that stress—ranging from job worries to divorce to bereavement to combat trauma—is a huge contributor to rates of both anxiety disorders and depression, as well as to hypertension, diabetes, and other medical conditions.

fact—I say this from experience—that being severely anxious is depressing. Anxiety can impede your relationships, impair your performance, constrict your life, and limit your possibilities.

Social phobics worry that their interpersonal awkwardness or the physical manifestations of anxiety—their blushing and shaking and stammering and sweating—will somehow reveal them to be weak or incompetent. So they get nervous, and then they stammer or blush, which makes them more nervous, which makes them stammer and blush more, which propels them into a vicious cycle of increasing anxiety and deteriorating performance. Blushing

Meditation led to decreased density of the amygdala, a physical change that was correlated with subjects' self-reported stress levels—as their amygdalae got less dense, the subjects felt less stressed. Other studies have found that Buddhist monks who are especially good at meditating show much greater activity in their frontal cortices, and much less in their amygdalae, than normal people.n Meditation and deep-breathing exercises work for

The ten critical psychological elements and characteristics of resilience that Charney has identified are optimism, altruism, having a moral compass or set of beliefs that cannot be shattered, faith and spirituality, humor, having a role model, social supports, facing fear (or leaving one's comfort zone), having a mission or meaning in life, and practice in meeting and overcoming challenges.

But less so than I did before. Not long ago in my own therapy with Dr. W., we moved gingerly into "imaginal" exposure for my phobias.

The politics of death is bureaucracy, routine, rules, status quo. The politics of life is personal initiative, creativity, flair, dash, a little daring. The politics of death is calculation, prudence, measured gestures. The politics of life is experience, spontaneity, grace, directness. The politics of death is fear of youth. The politics of life is to trust the young to their own experiences.

Anxiety," he wrote, "is apprehension about future suffering—the fearful anticipation of an unbearable catastrophe one is hopeless to prevent." For Dr. W., the defining signature of anxiety, and what makes it more than a pure animal instinct, is its orientation toward the future.