HEALTH What’s causing anxiety rates in Canada to soar?

40 PER CENT OF CANADIANS STRUGGLE WITH ANXIETY

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.

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.

Anxiety is seeded in our evolution, an adaptive response to keep us from getting eaten by tigers, said Dr. Allen Frances, professor emeritus of psychiatry at Duke University and creator of the diagnostic criteria for narcissistic personality disorder.

“We shouldn’t expect an anxiety-free life. It’s adaptive to feel anxious.”

Survey results also tend to greatly exaggerate disorders, Frances said. “People say ‘well, isn’t this an unusually anxiety-provoking time?’

“I would invite those people to think about what it was like to be in Nazi Germany. Or what it’s like today to be in Syria, or on the road from Africa to Europe because you don’t have food to eat and you’re afraid of being attacked by pirates,” Frances said.

He doesn’t mean to trivialize true, disabling anxieties. However, “we live in an unusually privileged moment in time and place. We don’t live in a period of stress anywhere near where people have lived in historically, or that people are suffering from around the world.”

There’s a lot in this world that’s worth being anxious about, Frances said. “That’s not pathological. That’s part of life.”

WHY IS EVERYBODY SO HAPPY AND I’M SO MISERABLE?