THE ANXIOUS AMERICANS
AMERICANS are a pretty anxious people. Nearly one in five of us — 18 percent — has an anxiety disorder. We spend over $2 billion a year on anti-anxiety medications. College students are often described as more stressed than ever before. There are many explanations for these nerves: a bad job market, less cohesive communities, the constant self-comparison that is social media. In 2002 the World Mental Health Survey found that Americans were the most anxious people in the 14 ｃountries studied, with more clinically significant levels of anxiety than people in Nigeria, Lebanon and Ukraine.
To be clear, research suggests that anxiety is at least partially temperamental. A recent study of 592 rhesus monkeys found that some of them responded more anxiously than others and that as much as 30 percent of early anxiety may be inherited.
Yet what is inherited is the potential for anxiety, not anxiety itself. Life events obviously play a role. Another, less obvious factor may be the way we think about the mind: as an interior place that demands careful, constant attention.
Humans seem to distinguish between mind and body in all cultures, but the sharp awareness of mind as a possession, distinct from soul and body, comes from the Enlightenment. It was then, in the aftermath of the crisis of religious authority and the scientific revolution, that there were intense debates about the nature of mental events. Between 1600 and 1815, the place where mental stuff happened — the “thing that thinks,” to use Descartes’s phrase — came to seem more and more important, as George Makari, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, explains in his forthcoming book, “Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind.”
From this, Mr. Makari writes, was developed the psychological mind and psychoanalysis and an expectation that personal thoughts and feelings are the central drivers of human action — not roles, not values, not personal sensation, not God. In the United States, the enormous psychotherapeutic and self-help industry teaches us that we must pay scrupulous attention to inner experience. To succeed and be happy, we are taught, we need to know what we feel.
Not everyone else believes this. Take response to psychiatric illness. Americans believe that excessive sadness makes us sick. Sadness is not the only symptom needed to meet criteria for a diagnosis of depression, but it is the one that characterizes the illness for us. That is not true in many other parts of the world. When the anthropologist and psychiatrist Arthur Kleinman carried out fieldwork in China in 1980, just before its borders were opened to the world, people who met criteria for depression complained mostly of chronic pain. They were often sad, just as those in the United States with depression often experience pain. But in that China, bodily pains — and not inner states — justified seeking care.
Americans think that the primary symptoms of schizophrenia are the quasi-auditory hallucinations that often accompany the disorder. When I interviewed people with schizophrenia who heard voices, they were clear that to hear voices meant that you were crazy. Anthropologists have shown that in other parts of the world, people are more likely to identify inappropriate behavior, rather than hearing voices, as schizophrenia’s primary symptoms, and that invisible voices are not always the mark of madness. A few years ago in southern India, I came to know a woman whose active hallucinations would mark her as very ill on a standard assessment. Yet neither her husband nor her father mentioned her hallucinations as a worry. Her problem, they said, was that she sometimes shouted.
Pixar’s new film “Inside Out” is about an 11-year-old girl forced to move across the ｃountry when her father joins a start-up in San Francisco. Riley leaves behind her beloved hockey team. Her new house seems cramped and ugly. She’s lonely, and decides to run away, back to Minnesota.
“Inside Out” tells this story from the point of view of her mind. Five emotions (fear, joy, sadness, disgust and anger) sit at a control panel in the aptly named headquarters. These emotions determine what she does. Anger grabs hold of the controls when her father insists she eat her broccoli. The plot hinges on a tussle between Joy and Sadness (Joy doesn’t want Sadness to touch Riley’s memories) in which the two are accidentally swept out of the control room. They get lost in Riley’s mind, wandering around the subconscious and imagination land (both of which are very large) while Anger is left in charge (a bad idea). In the end, Joy discovers how important sadness is for human connection, and Riley creates a good new life in San Francisco. As the movie ends we see a new, improved and more complex control panel, now with a button marked “puberty.”
It’s a charming movie. It is also distinctly American. It is based on a particular model of the mind that we take for granted, but that is in fact as culturally idiosyncratic as the way we dress. I’m not suggesting that the basic science of emotion depicted in the movie is wrong. Emotions do seem to be crucial in organizing human thinking. I’m suggesting that there is something deeply cultural about the way this mind is imagined, and that it has consequences for the way we experience thoughts and feelings.
Our high anxiety, whatever the challenges we face, is probably one of the consequences.
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VOCABULARY:
1. Quasi – seemingly apparently but not really
2. Idiosyncratic - of or relating to idiosyncrasy peculiar or individual.
3. Anxiety - a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease, typically about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome.
4. Scrupulous - thorough, and extremely attentive to details
5. Puberty - the period during which adolescents reach sexual maturity and become capable of reproduction.
DISCUSSION:
1. What makes you anxious?
2. When people feel heightened emotions, do you think it’s possible to be rational? Why/ Why not?
3. Are there preventive measures that could be done to lessen anxiety or avoid it altogether?
4. Have you seen the movie Inside Out? Do you think our emotions work like that, like a control panel?
