Life Over-Stimulating Anxiety

"There's no question in my mind anxiety levels are increasing."
"Life is about facing challenges, it's not only about being happy. But people are very pain-averse. People want to be comfortable and they want to be happy, but if you chase happiness by trying to push aside anything that's unpleasant and upsetting in your life, the irony is that it actually comes back with a vengeance."
"Everyone is sizing themselves up against somebody else. 'Why is everybody so happy and I' so miserable'?"
"Most of all, frankly, we don't have the level of adversity we used to [have]."
Dr. David H. Rosmarin, department of psychiatry, Harvard Medical School

"Although U.S. presidential elections occur every four years, the 2016 election was perhaps the most polarizing and emotionally evocative political event for young people in recent history."
2018 Study, Journal of American College Health

Almost 40% of Americans are more anxious than they were at this time last year, according to a new American Psychiatric Association (APA) poll.  Peechaya Burroughs for TIME

"[Up to 30 to 50 percent of anxiety disorders are heritable] and heritable disorders would not change their clinical picture substantially over decades or centuries."
"[More people are seeking treatment, thus anxiety appears more common]."
2015 Study, Dialogues in Clinical Neurosciences

"[In Canada], there is a widely held belief -- I personally don't think it has a strong basis in evidence -- that there has been a deterioration in mental health, that there's more depression or more anxiety afflicting people than has occurred in the past."
"As an epidemiologist, we just haven't been able to say that in Canada. In Canada, a lot of parents and grandparents are immigrants and they came in and were eating fried potato peels and trying to scrounge and make a buck and sell what they could."
"Now we have a lot of luxuries. We're not used to facing adversity."
Dr. Scott Patten, professor of psychiatry, University of Calgary

"We shouldn't expect an anxiety-free life. It's adaptive to feel anxious. People say, 'well, isn't this an unusually anxiety-provoking time?"
"I would invite those people to think about what it was like to be in Nazi Germany. Or what it's like today to be in Syria, or on the road from Africa to Europe because you don't have food to eat and you're afraid of being attacked by pirates."
"We live in an unusually privileged moment in time and place. We don't live in a period of stress anywhere near where people have lived in historically, or that people are suffering from around the world."
"That's not pathological. That's part of life [to be concerned about worrying things happening]."
Dr. Allen Frances, professor emeritus of psychiatry, Duke University

iStock Photo

None of these experts is blase about what worrying does to peoples' minds, none shrug off the phenomenon of anxiety and how it eats away at our individual and collective sense of security by mouthing the platitude "don't worry, be happy", that flippant, anodyne phrase that was so abrasively popular not that long ago. It's possible that since that very phrase first made its entrance on the media cycle of the time that the world in general and thus the world that people experience has become a more difficult place to struggle within.


But it is studies taking place in North America, in Canada and the United States, that point out that in those wealthy, regulated, peaceful and democratic nations people are becoming increasingly stressed by what they perceive as both world affairs and those of their own. In Canada a poll of 1,500 people recently found that 41 percent of those surveyed spoke of themselves as "someone who struggles with anxiety", while a third stated they had been diagnosed with anxiety and a similar number had anti-depressants prescribed for them.

In the United States another study was left with the impression that so many young people were psychologically traumatized after the election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency that fully one-quarter of American college students were seen to be at risk of PTSD. Perhaps, the Trump election to the presidency, as unexpected as it was owes its notoriety more to the social-political atmosphere prevailing in universities and colleges and popular news reportage for this outcome than the actual election results where partisan politics has swung out of hand, both sides acidly fulminating against the other.

After all, the United States was in an uproar when it elected its first Roman Catholic president in John F. Kennedy; a peanut farmer and born-again Christian in Jimmy Carter; and a grade-B actor in Ronald Reagan. Now they have an unabashed braggart and sometimes-bully, among his finer qualities, but the election was, after all, free and fair democracy at work. The votes swung with Trump against an equally incompetent Democrat, as the American electorate saw the situation.

The real question is, what drives anxiety levels so high in both countries? Can it all be put down to the prevalence of social media intruding on everyone's perceptions and life to that great a deleterious degree? Has the turmoil in the world been greater in its dysfunction and fallout abroad than what  usually pertains? Are we so obsessed as celebrity-admiring societies that we expect our lives to be as glamorous and free of stress as we imagine the lives of the wealthy and famous to be?

The Canadian survey commissioned by Yahoo Canada and conducted by Abacus Data saw 34 percent of adult men and 47 percent of women agreeing, "I consider myself someone who struggles with anxiety", and among those between the ages of 30 and under, 70 percent of women and 53 percent of men reported feelings of stressful anxiety, while among 18- to 29-year-olds 63 percent reported feelings of high anxiety. Had the survey asked of respondents the reason they feel anxious, we all might be the wiser for it.

Among anxiety disorders is a litany of subgroups including obsessive-compulsive disorder, panic disorder, agoraphobia, social phobia and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) exemplified by individuals who worry excessively and uncontrollably in their everyday lives. Anxiety disorders represent the most common mental disorders, according to experts. Among women such disorders are more common, peaking in midlife, and for some the symptoms come and go, while in severe instances people can become seriously impaired.

Tellingly, it is the prevalence of anxiety that has led to a growing marketing of products meant to calm the anxiety-prone; with anxiety apps, magnetic bracelets, weighted blankets of glass beads and poly pellets -- and the final frontier of solutions-for-all, legal marijuana to still jumpy nerves. Some health professionals point out that in their expert opinion we've created a health-related scare where none really  exists in over-diagnosing anxiety, in so doing medicalizing normal anxiety that comes with life.

Objective: This study compared the prevalence of depression and the determinants of mental health service use in Canada and the United States.
Methods: The study used data from preliminary analyses of the 2003 Joint Canada/United States Survey of Health, which measured Canadian (N=3,505) and United States (N=5,183) resident ratings of health and health care services. Cross-national comparisons were made for the 12-month prevalence of DSM-IV major depression, 12-month service use for mental health reasons according to the type of professional seen, and determinants of service use.
Results: The rates of depression were similar in Canada (8.2%) and the United States (8.7%). However, U.S. respondents without medical insurance were twice as likely as Canadian respondents and U.S. respondents with medical insurance to meet the criteria for depression. Rates of mental health service use did not differ between Canada (10.1%) and the United States (10.6%). In the United States, medical insurance was not a determinant factor of service use. However, U.S. respondents with no medical insurance were more likely than the other two groups to report an unmet need. Also, among those with depression, U.S. respondents with no medical insurance were less likely to use any type of mental health service (36.5%) than U.S. respondents with medical insurance (55.7%) and Canadians (55.7%). Further, a positive correlation between a mental health need and service use was observed in Canada but not for those without medical insurance in the United States.
Conclusions: There was no difference in the prevalence of depression and mental health service use between Canada and the United States. Among those with depression, however, disparities in treatment seeking were found to be associated with medical insurance in the United States. Both Canada and the United States need to improve access to health services for those with mental disorders, and special attention is needed for those without medical insurance in the United States.
Do Canada and the United States differ in prevalence of depression and utilization of services?
Vasiliadis HM, Lesage A, Adair C, Wang PS, Kessler RC