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

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 human toll--its crippling impact, its power to paralyze--yet also discusses new treatments, and shows how its sufferers find ways to manage and control their symptoms. My Age of Anxiety is an account at once humorous and inspirational, learned and empathetic, that demystifies a pervasive affliction too often misunderstood.