Nine months ago I published the post “Depression and Anxiety: The Main Academic Keywords Today” and I return today to the topic out of a need to process a situation that is beginning to make me quite angry.
I am going through a personal complicated period, with immediate material causes that are slowly sorting themselves out (not mental issues per se), and I asked my local herbalist to provide me with a bottle of passiflora drops. This was first given to me thirty years ago by another sympathetic herbalist as a means to cope with the constant distress that the research and writing of my PhD dissertation produced, funnily not because of my topic (monstrosity!) but because, as a good hypochondriac, I was overwhelmed by the idea that I would fall ill, never finish the thesis and, hence, deprive my life of its meaning. This sounds quite frivolous and silly now but it was a major cause of anxiety at the time, for three long years.
The passiflora did help (perhaps as a placebo, who knows) and, besides, I did not want to take again diazepam, which I was given once when I was a very nervous undergraduate student that would regularly vomit every day I had an exam. Diazepam made me sleepy and confused, which worsened my anxiety, and I haven’t taken any chemical tranquilizers manufactured by pharmas until literally two weeks ago when passiflora stopped working and I realized I needed something stronger. The doctor gave me Trankimazin, that is to say, alprazolam, also known as Xanax.
‘Welcome to the land of Trankimazin’, he said, as he offered to sign sick leave for me, the very last thing I need right now. The doctor saw in his files that I am a teacher and wrongly assumed that teaching is giving me anxiety. Not at all. I just took two pills and decided they were not helping me to solve the problems causing the anxiety, just to face them with a little less reluctance. The passiflora is also back in the medicine cabinet. I’m just fighting my first-world problems thinking of the truly serious problems I could be having, take your pick.
My good doctor wanted to talk further and stopped me as I was leaving to ask me why so many young people are paralyzed by anxiety. Possibly in his early sixties, the doctor told me he had been bullied in school and had gone through other rough patches in his childhood and youth. ‘It’s just life’, he said. ‘So’, he added, ‘why are young people so anxious?’ I run the risk of turning this reflection on a generational comparison that will benefit no one, but I too have a lingering suspicion that something is amiss.
Speaking this morning with one of my doctoral students, who suffers from anxiety and has chosen to process it by writing about climate change and anxiety in fiction, she told me that Greta Thunberg embraced activism as a way to cope with her own anxiety. She turned fear and unease into rage, and there she is, mocking the patriarchal monsters giving us so much apprehension, from Donald Trump to Andrew Tate. The many young women who attended worldwide the feminist demonstrations on 8 March, International Women’s Day, are also embracing their anti-patriarcal anger and fighting back.
This includes fighting against the neoliberal institutions and interests that are depressing us, painting a view of life which is almost unmanageable. Christianity teaches that life is a vale of tears, a valley of sorrow, meaning that you have to put up with complications as they come, which is, in my view, very valuable teaching (though I am an atheist). The other part, that if you’re good and don’t complain too much you are rewarded with heaven is fairy-tale nonsense. And, of course, let’s not forget that most early Christians were either slaves or poor people who needed comfort for their situation; the rich have always placed the others in the vale of tears while they have enjoyed a different standard of life, pretending to make up for it through charity (Bill Gates, anyone?). Socialism still makes the best of having unveiled this fundamental hypocrisy by asking disenfranchised people to abandon Christian conformism and fight for the right to a share of the good life on Earth, for all, and in equal terms. Feminism is also, as I have noted, another movement aiming at turning women’s dissatisfaction into justice right here, right now.
Neoliberalism, in contrast, gives us all and especially the young crippling anxiety, which used to be a general phrase to describe the low moments of life and is now a mental issue. Therapist Jill E. Daino claims that 30% of Americans will suffer “an anxiety disorder in their lifetime”, among which crippling anxiety is the worst. Here are the symptoms: “feelings of fear, panic, or a general unsettled feeling; feeling ‘on edge’; feeling irritable and even angry; difficulty sleeping; nausea, stomachaches, and digestive upset; dizziness, feeling unsteady; headaches, neck pain, muscle tension; racing thoughts; nightmares; withdrawing from social situations or isolating yourself; excessive sweating; rapid heartbeat; inability to sit still; and tight breathing”. I would agree that suffering from all these for a long time and for no specific reason is worrying indeed; give me Xanax, quick! But what kind of robotic human being goes through life remaining immune to any of these symptoms? The kind of normality that emerges from denying that the symptoms are part of life is not human: nobody floats through without nightmares or never missing sleep. The figure is, then, wrong: 100% of humankind does suffer “an anxiety disorder in their lifetime” because this is how life works. The sources of distress cannot be controlled, not even by multibillionaires of the most privileged disposition who also fall mortally ill, lose beloved persons, fall in and out of love, etc.
The very privileged, in any case, do not care for the others’ welfare. In fact, the neoliberal position they uphold is that if you’re not physically and mentally healthy that is your fault for being a lazy, limited individual, hence the insistence on your duty to exercise until the day you die and be generally happy. Neoliberalism will not, however, do anything to solve the structural causes of ill-health, from the presence of carcinogens in overprocessed food to an economic system that is pushing more and more people into precarious lives threatened by climate change, financial disaster, the rise of AI and so on.
The young have been told by patriarchal neoliberalism that feeling indignant and angry at their ill-treatment is passé, a sort of neo-hippy, neo-1968 hangover that needs to be done with. In the absence of the Christian vale of tears and the loss of the fantasy of heaven, the young are being told that youth consists of having fun. If you feel anxiety because you are not that happy, then you are mentally ill and in need of treatment until you become again a Foucauldian docile body (and mind). Just do not complain. At the same time, and this is peculiar, I see posters in my school about experiments in resilience (to find out whether students have it or not), the basic human quality that has helped humans survive horrors as unspeakable as World War I or the Nazi Holocaust. Or now the war in Ukraine, or do you think Ukrainians are coping thanks to Xanax?
Jessica Klein has described the United States as a bully society in her eponymous book and I would like to extend that label to the patriarchal neoliberal society that is making all of us so anxious about Earth’s limited future and, hence, that of the younger generations. I have no doubt that they feel a very real, wholly justified anxiety but I have no doubt either that the younger generations are falling into the neoliberal trap by which anger is presented as an unwanted emotion. I am not speaking here of the anger that Vladimir Putin is now feeling because he cannot occupy Ukraine. I am talking of the constructive anger that led so many women at the turn of the 20th century to demand rights for women, and to the anger that led so many workers to demand that working hours be cut down to eight and weeks to five working days.
The crippling anxiety so many young persons feel is a result of a bullying so intense by neoliberalism that it has become a replacement for life. Individuals may cope with their own distress with therapy, if they can afford it, but where is the ‘therapy’ for the socials ills that cause that distress? Buried under a mass of fatality that neoliberal patriarchs are using to curb down any general resistance to their rule is the anger all of us should be feeling at their in-your-face disregard for human life.
I don’t have a recipe to heal the 20% students in my own university that are officially diagnosed as suffering from mental health issues, but I have a utopian project for them: try to turn your distress into anger against the bullies that have us eating and breathing trash, that don’t care whether hospitals are underfunded and migrants drowning in the sea even though we do need them. Don’t let yourselves be told climate change is not happening but don’t just accept there is no future. You don’t feel crippling anxiety coming from your own mind. Your minds are being crippled by neoliberal patriarchal monsters who know that an anxious person is a controllable person. Please, defend yourselves, fight back.