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In the early ’90s an epidemic of mental disorder was sweeping America and Britain … uncovered by a new system for identifying disorders. Psychiatry had been attacked for relying on the personal and fallible judgement of psychiatrists and instead a new objective methods based on checklists had been invented. Adam Curtis, The Trap II: The Lonely Robot, BBC 2007
The drug companies announced they had created a new type of drug called an SSRI which they claimed targetted circuits inside the brain that were causing these misfunctions … like Prozac … The result was liberation from anxiety on a wide scale. But in the process the checklists became a powerful and seemingly objective guide for people as to what should be their normal feelings and what was abnormal. ibid.
Large parts of normal human experience, grief, disappointment, loneliness, were all being reclassified as medical disorders. In the process a new system of management was emerging: the drugs took away those complex and difficult feelings and made the individuals happier. But they also made them simpler beings, more easy to predict and manage. ibid.
In America in the 1960s was a man who was convinced that there was something frightening hidden under the surface of the new modern suburbs. Behind what looked like a confident individualism was rising up throughout America there were really hidden fears eating away at people from inside. There were feelings of anxiety, loneliness and emptiness, and he was convinced he could make a lot of money out of these feelings: he was called Arthur Sackler … Valium: he offered it to the doctors as an extraordinary new way to treat these inner anxieties, and he said it wasn’t dangerous or addictive. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head III: Money Changes Everything, BBC 2021
A new drug was created: it was made by a company that had been founded by Arthur Sackler. In the 1970s Sackler had marketed the drug Valium to deal with the feelings of anxiety and loneliness in the sufferers. He had died in the 1980s but in the mid-’90s his company released a new drug called Oxycontin. It was a synthetic form of opium and it was sold as a painkiller … The doctors gave them Oxycontin, they got their benefits, they also discovered that Oxycontin made them feel safe, in a bubble, protected from the anxieties and fears of the new post-industrial world. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head V: The Lordly Ones *****
The anxieties of the Cold War had conditioned the American public to fear the worst. Alan Hart, Media Morphs II: Conspiracy, Edge Media 2012
The search for Nirvana, like the search for Utopia or the end of history or the classless society, is ultimately a futile and dangerous one. It involves, if it does not necessitate, the sleep of reason. There is no escape from anxiety and struggle. Christopher Hitchens, Love Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays
Today the individual has become the highest form, and the greatest bane, of artistic creation. The smallest wound or pain of the ego is examined under a microscope as if it were of eternal importance. The artist considers his isolation, his subjectivity, his individualism almost holy. Thus we finally gather in one large pen, where we stand and bleat about our loneliness without listening to each other and without realizing that we are smothering each other to death. The individualists stare into each other’s eyes and yet deny each other’s existence. We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the gangster's whim and the purest ideal. Ingmar Bergman
For as long as I can remember I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety which I have tried to express in my art. Edvard Munch
Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. Soren Kierkegaard
Anxiety is love’s greatest killer. It creates the failures. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic. Anais Nin, diary February 1947
Anxiety does not empty tomorrow of its sorrows, but only empties today of its strength. Charles Spurgeon
Now is the age of anxiety. W H Auden
The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the effect of anxiety. Sigmund Freud
With spectacular events taking up so much of the available anxiety quotient, we need to be constantly reminded of the more workaday threats to our mortality – threats that, while they may also be functions of human error, have become so ubiquitous that we’ve begun to apprehend them as natural phenomena. Will Self
The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety. Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead 1947
We share our predecessors anxieties about the dangers of scientific progress. Dominic Sandbrook: Let Us Entertain You III: Modern Victorians, BBC 2015
Worrying ourselves sick: is searching for symptoms online turning us into a nation of cyber-chondriacs. Or is digital diagnoses just the start? But does it mean NHS GP practices are being left behind? Tonight: Dr Google: Do DIY Diagnoses Work? ITV 2018
‘I’ve never known such a large proportion of a year group suffer with anxiety. I think it’s gotten worse every year I’ve been in the game.’ School I, teacher, BBC 2018
Prescriptions have skyrocketed in the last two decades. Take Your Pills: Xanax, news, Netflix 2022
Anxiety and addiction: More addictive than we think. ibid.
I don’t know if anyone here’s tried Xanax. It’s fantastic. ibid. comedian
One of the biggest mistakes of my life. ibid. addict