My Age of Anxiety Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind | Stossel, Scott

From the editor of The Atlantic comes a riveting, revelatory memoir of life with anxiety--and the history of the scientists, philosophers, artists, and writers who have worked to understand this condition. As recently as thirty years ago, anxiety was not an officially classified disorder. Today, it is the most commonly diagnosed mental illness. Stossel, drawing on his own lifelong battle with anxiety, gives us an astonishing history, at once intimate and authoritative, of this condition. We see the earliest medical accounts of anxiety (Galen, Hippocrates) through later observers (Robert Burton, Søren Kierkegaard) to the great nineteenth-century scientists who began to pinpoint its sources and causes (William James, Freud). We are shown the famous individuals who suffered from anxiety (Charles Darwin, Samuel Johnson, Walker Percy). And we see Stossel's own struggles, from his wedding-day panic attack to the litany of treatments he has tried.      Always, Stossel focuses on anxiety's hum