Far and away, the most common mental illness troubling the human animal is Generalized Anxiety Disorder, which can make life really miserable for almost 25% of women and 15% of men.
When it’s not “chronic”, i.e., with you all the time, a little anxiety is actually useful. You feel a little anxious when you’re deciding (or not) to walk down a dark alley, and sensing potential danger, take another route. If you were to inventory your physical and emotional symptoms at the beginning of that alley (heightened awareness, increased heart and breathing rate), that’s a normal and very brief “fight or flight” response. “Functional fear”, a safety mechanism, probably saved your butt more often than you know. The Flying Wallendas could have used this. Or Evel Knievel.
However, when you go through much of life, good days and bad, experiencing anxiety, worrying thoughts, disturbed sleep, segueing into and out of panic attacks, then you probably need professional help.
Although doctors aren’t positive why some people suffer chronic anxiety and others don’t, the overall numbers have been increasing. People say this is because there’s more to worry about, but the Middle Ages weren’t so great. I think we’re more willing to talk about anxiety, and treatments have improved. Up to the 1940’s, a woman with a panic attack might spend the rest of her life in a state mental hospital. Up to the 1960’s, she’d get a prefrontal lobotomy. I wrote about this, but maybe you’d rather not read it.
We now know the brain chemical serotonin is involved with both depression and anxiety. If you think of serotonin as your ‘factory installed buffer against stress’, you can sort of guess that a lot of the medications and supplements (the SSRI meds like Prozac, Zoloft, Lexapro, St. John’s wort) for anxiety are geared toward boosting serotonin. The female brain has less serotonin than her male counterpart, hence the female susceptibility to both anxiety and depression. Although these medications are widely prescribed, and get good grades from patients, they’re not free from side effects and often take weeks for full effect. When, about three weeks later, the meds work, the response is interesting: “You know doctor, the stuff that was stressing me out is still there. It just isn’t bothering me as much.” That comes from raising your serotonin stress buffer.
