The great anxiety con: life has always been stressful
In California, almost every woman I know is being treated for anxiety
Do you often feel nervous or uneasy about situations with uncertain outcomes? Do you worry that you have no real control over how your day will turn out? Then you may be suffering from a debilitating condition called “anxiety”. Or you may, like a few billion of your ancestors over the past 200,000 years, simply be navigating that tricky thing called “life”.
Poor Stephen Astbury from Blackburn had the condition. Indeed, the 32-year-old’s anxiety was so bad that he couldn’t work. He could, however, jet-ski, ski, snorkel, quad-bike, pose in front of the Eiffel Tower and holiday in exotic places around the globe – all funded by the £15,000 in benefits that he claimed over two years. And he could devote a sizable chunk of time to chronicling these pursuits on Facebook.
Because, as it turned out, the fatherof-five wasn’t suffering from “anxiety”, but the lesser-known condition of “cretinitis”, which compels fraudsters, thieves and liars to expose themselves in a farcical fashion on social media. When officials from the Department for Work and Pensions saw the fatherof-five’s exploits on Facebook, Astbury was given a 32-week prison sentence (suspended for 12 months), ordered to pay a £115 victim surcharge, and is probably now in a genuinely anxious state for which he will receive neither medication nor sympathy.
Bungling small-time fraudsters have enraged and amused since the beginning of time, but it’s the cynical manner in which this man used mental illness to further his own ends that needs to be highlighted. Because I’ve seen mental illness played at and used fraudulently before, and because if doctors are signing off the likes of quad-biking, work-shy Astbury with “anxiety” then they, like an increasing number of their patients, are reacting faddishly to an arena where fads and fashions have no place: that of mental health.
As a term, “anxiety” invites misuse, both cynical and accidental – and by “accidental” I mean the people who have read so many interviews with celebrities who claim to be suffering from the condition alongside so many headlines asking “Are you suffering from anxiety?” that they are inclined to think: “Yes.”
If they are finding themselves rooted to the spot on a train platform in the midst of rush hour – like a friend of mine once did – if their heart is pounding and their palms are sweating and they cannot see their way out of the station, let alone the frenzied internal dialogue they’re trapped in, then they might well be suffering from an anxiety disorder.
But chronic anxiety isn’t the only kind out there and, according to Anxiety UK, Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD) – worrying too much about everyday things – is on the rise. The problem, of course, is that aside from the Dalai Lama and the whole of perfect Denmark, GAD symptoms could apply to most of us. Modern life is a stressful business.
Which one of us hasn’t felt a quickening of the pulse and shallowness of breath before a meeting or presentation? Which one of us hasn’t felt on the verge of a panic attack in a packed railway carriage at rush hour, spent the entire plane journey fretting over whether they left the oven on and many an evening down the black hole of anxiety that is social media?
And if professional anxiety doesn’t eat you up whole, then you can be damn sure parental anxiety will. How much worrying is too much?
My worry is that in today’s society any amount of worrying is seen as too much. Other generations worried about their children being killed on the battlefield; we have “micro-aggressions”. With science as sophisticated as it now is we feel as outraged by momentary physical or mental discomfort as we do when – for a bleak minute or two – we lose our internet connection. Responsibility and accountability being the discomforting things that they are, we welcome anything that might take either or both off our hands. More than that, we want everything – however nuanced and multi-layered and enmeshed in the human state – fixed.
Back in California, where I have spent the past five years (and always see us being in 10), almost every woman I know is being treated for anxiety. Explain to me how that works in terms of statistics? And while you’re at it, explain to me why, after making small talk with a doctor on the difficulties of finishing a novel, I was immediately advised to take anti-anxiety medication? Show me a non-anxious writer and I’ll show you a woman who hates cushions.
You’re not allowed to be flippant on the subject of mental health, but that’s exactly what the doctors making these casual, faddish diagnoses, the people prone to casual, faddish self-diagnosis and the likes of Mr Astbury – cynically using disorders and syndromes for their own ends – are being. And maybe on the medical side there are good intentions there. Maybe the feeling is that by raising the number of people “afflicted” by anxiety, they’ll raise the disorder’s profile, too. But all it really does is dilute the seriousness of a condition about which there is already, unfortunately, a great deal of scepticism.