For a brief but intense period in 2006, Patricia Pearson logged on daily to Flu Wiki. This is a Web site (fluwikie.com) devoted to the concerns - the very deep concerns - of people convinced that a worldwide outbreak of influenza is imminent, and that it will make the ravages of the Black Death seem like a mildly unpleasant interlude.
"Here could be found a great milling together of fiercely articulate and freaked-out people from around the world, posting to discussion topics like 'What Will We Do With the Bodies?' Pearson writes in A Brief History of Anxiety. Visitors to the site offered suggestions on how to turn back the infected, zombie-like hordes who, in a desperate search for food, will try to invade the fortified homes of the healthy.
Pearson, the author of the highly amusing Area Woman Blows Gasket, sees the humor in Flu Wiki, but she too worries about pandemics. A lot. She also obsesses about sudden liver failure, possibly cancerous moles, flying insects, the supervolcano underneath Yosemite National Park and the possibility that her car will blow up. All of this seems potentially hilarious, but the humor quickly freezes as Pearson describes a lifetime of absurd but crippling fears.
Like 40 million Americans, Pearson suffers from anxiety, which she pithily calls "fear in search of a cause." Her own case fascinates her, and quite rightly. It presents her with the opportunity to examine modern civilization and its discontents, as well as her own miseries, which she does, thoughtfully and incisively.
Her subject is elusive. Unnamed until Freud coined the term "anxiety neurosis," the uninvited stranger lurks at the margins of history. When King David, in the Bible, says that "fearfulness and trembling are come upon me," is he suffering an anxiety attack? Pearson cites an 18th-century English treatise blaming city living for "a class and set of distempers, with atrocious and frightful symptoms, scarce known to our Ancestors," that is, "nervous disorders" afflicting a third of the population. Could this be it?
Everywhere and nowhere, anxiety, Pearson writes, is "unbearably vivid yet insanely abstract." In many cases it is the fear of fear itself, a free-floating, nebulous entity that, like a mutant virus, feeds on any available host. Reason is powerless against it. Pearson argues, in fact, that rationalism, intended to banish superstition and fear, has instead removed one of the most effective weapons against anxiety, namely religious faith and ritual.
Even worse, the worship of reason and science, by encouraging the notion that human beings can control their environment, has created a terrible fault line in the modern psyche, although not all societies suffer equally. Mexicans have lots to worry about but don't. The World Mental Health Survey, conducted in 2002, found that only 6.6 percent of Mexicans had ever experienced a major episode of anxiety or depression. Meanwhile, to their north, 28.8 percent of the American population has been afflicted with anxiety, the highest level in the world. Mexicans who move to the US adapt, becoming more anxious.
In searching for the roots of her affliction, Pearson finds a common thread connecting her traumas and her phobias, the fear of losing control, of being unable to cope. As a child, caught up in the India-Pakistan war in 1971, she cowered in her family's house in New Delhi, waiting for bombs to fall. She was terrified of the dark. At 23, she suffered a nervous breakdown after her boyfriend casually informed her, on a visit to her family's summer house in Canada, that he was seeing another woman. A diagnosis of "generalized anxiety disorder" ensued.
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