Posted by Writers Festival on April 8, 2008, 5:16 pm, in reply to "Patricia Pearson's Anxiety (and Yours)"
67.70.70.184
What, me worry?
A Brief History of Anxiety: Yours and Mine by Patricia Pearson. Random House Canada;
Toronto, Ontario, 2008. (198 pages). Reviewed by Donald R. Officer.
Researchers will tell you fear is an emotion we all experience – often. That’s hardly news. Fear may pass through our minds fleetingly or dwell there for a while during episodes we might later wish to put behind us or recall vividly as peak moments. Fear may generate exhilaration, energy, focus and clarity of purpose. Influenced by fear we may do noble or shameful things or nothing at all. Yet despite the ambivalences it sometimes generates, fear is attached to its sources in a legitimate way and consequently concentrated on associated outcomes. Not so its mongrel cousin, anxiety.
Patricia Pearson knows anxiety well and does the reader an important service in distinguishing it from fear. She points out that many of the things she is or has been afraid of are worthy of fear or caution, but that good sense is not the source of her feelings. She is curious about her own irrationality when it comes to anxiety. Why is she anxious about liver failure, flying and cows, but has no particular concerns about bats, house fires, social censure or breast cancer?
Those who suffer from anxiety know they there is a big qualitative difference between their kind of aversion and that of the reflexive reticence people frequently demonstrate in the face of the dangerous or the suspicious. Irrational fears of the specific are known as phobias and belong to the realm of anxiety. Pearson describes the range of anxiety classification beginning with the phobic and listing also those prone to panic attacks, obsessive compulsion, post-traumatic stress disorder and generalized anxiety. She claims the generalized anxiety label while noting that the anxiety spectrum includes an astonishing near 20 percent of the population.
That is, anxiety directly affects nearly forty million Americans, a significantly smaller percentage of Canadians and a much smaller proportion of Mexicans. Patricia Pearson cites the puzzling evidence behind the link that seems to define the irrational essence of anxiety. On the face of the evidence, people who should be more worried are apparently less so. The tendency to anxiety like heart disease or cancer is not notably heritable but rather a product of our high strung cultural environment. Immigrants from low anxiety third world cultures quickly start to acclimatize to the ironically more maladaptive high anxiety world of urban America.
Anxiety is no fun. However, Patricia Pearson’s light feature writer’s touch keeps this book as entertaining as it is instructive. She is always able to take herself lightly using her own story as both example and incentive that shows us up close what keeps the writer’s curiosity engaged. Take this tentative reaction of her husband’s to the author’s growing fear of imminent pandemic disaster, “…last week a box with twelve containers of freeze-dried vegetables arrived at the house from a company called Survival Acres, and I meant to ask you about it, you know, but I forgot, and now you seem to have purchased a really big tin of powdered butter.” Life at the Pearson household must be interesting.
Had you not heard, Patricia Pearson is the granddaughter of former Prime Minister and Nobel Laureate Lester B. Pearson who led this country in the turbulent sixties after a long career in the Foreign Service. The Prime Minister’s son Geoffrey was the author’s father and was himself a career diplomat. During one of his far eastern postings, his young family was briefly exposed to the conflict accompanying the emergence of the state of Bangladesh. The experience may have been brief, but the after effects of wartime trauma had a troubling impact on young Patricia that sullied some of her earliest and warmest associations with the safety of home.
Later the family cottage would be associated with the break up of her first great love affair. Pearson relays the story of this personal catastrophe with a wit that must have sustained her like a frayed but essential lifeline as much as today it amuses her readers, “On an August evening redolent with the smell of dead weasel, the man I hoped to marry announced in happy pleasure that he’d discovered it was possible to love me and a woman named Poppy at the same time.” Pearson’s poignant flashbacks reveal traces of the anxiety demon among her relatives past and present. Anxiety as an affliction runs in families and possibly tribes. The ability of newcomers to pick up on free floating worry notwithstanding, painful stories go back for generations.
The condition of anxiety has only been properly differentiated from other mood disorders in recent decades and treatments still lag behind whatever understanding we have. Anyone who has endured any form or length of sojourn with the wonderful world of psychopharmacology must read Chapter 8, “2001: A Drugs Odyssey.” In this chapter, Pearson’s feature writing capacity to weave personal experience with well scrutinized source material is particularly strong. However, for me the most important chapter in this book is the one preceding it where the author tackles the cruel enormity of workplace hypocrisy and the use of anxiety as a manipulative strategy.
Once or twice Patricia Pearson refers to the work of Rollo May whose Meaning of Anxiety and later works in psychology and creativity raised the issues of anxiety to the level of spiritual contest. I would have liked to hear more about what this author makes of May’s existential philosophy of anxiety. Yet she argues her most important case by her own example as she rises above the enticements of shameless self promotion. In her life and career she has put the values of honesty, craftsmanship and the general good ahead of mindless narcissism. Why is it that the earnest and forthright suffer so disproportionately from this condition when those who so richly deserve to be afflicted with it seem to escape its most insidious agonies?
NOTE:
Kathryn has posted a link to Robert Rosen’s recently released “Just Enough Anxiety” that includes the first chapter of a very different but decidedly interesting view of the subject of anxiety. Rosen’s approach is not ill intentioned but recalls what Pearson has explored from the inside of her world (and the outside of his). The question you might want to ponder is whether or not our leaders have the right to raise or lower anxiety levels to gain support or dampen objections to their initiatives.
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