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Anxious? Depressed? Happy? There's a Book for You
February 22, 2008
Depressed? Happy? Anxious? There’s a Book for You
Is anxiety the new depression? After years of inundation with memoirs, studies and medical self-help books about depression, and a so-called national conversation on the subject in the wake of revelations from Tipper Gore, William Styron and others, the flood subsided.
Instead, I’ve started getting books about anxiety, most recently A Brief History of Anxiety... Yours and Mine, by Patricia Peterson (Bloomsbury, Mar.).
Various subsets of anxiety are also coming to the fore, such as social anxiety and OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder). The most recent books to cross my desk are The Thought That Counts: A Firsthand Account of One Teenager’s Experience with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, by Jared Kant, Martin Franklin and Linda Wasmer Andrews (Oxford Univ., Mar.), and Compulsive Acts: A Psychiatrist’s Tales of Ritual and Obsession, by Elias Aboujaoude, M.D. (Univ. of California, Apr.).
Not only is depression lagging as a book topic, it seems to have incited a new flood of books on happiness (just a sampling from the last year: The Geography of Bliss;The How of Happiness; Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill; Happiness Is an Inside Job).
And now Eric Wilson’s just-published Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy (Crichton/FSG)—clearly a rejoinder to Peter Kramer’s 2005 Against Depression—questions the whole happiness thing.
Having struggled with depression (or melancholia, the more evocative, less clinical term he prefers), I have trouble with Wilson’s argument that depression is a more profound state than happiness, and that it’s a wellspring of creativity. And like so many, Wilson seems, erroneously, I believe, to blame psychiatrists for our overvaluing happiness and devaluing depression.
I think Peter Kramer poses the more interesting perspective in Listening to Prozac, where he questions how our society as a whole values different personality styles.People who are mildly depressed do not fare well here, socially or economically. Americans prefer people who are always upbeat.
But I digress. My question is: why so many books about our psychological woes? Is it really possible that we’re the most emotionally challenged generation ever? Are we the most depressed, the most anxious, the most obsessed with happiness? Or are we simply the most self-conscious, the most extensively polled and studied and recorded?
Posted by Sarah Gold on February 22, 2008 | Comments (2)
