The Anxiety Epidemic

It’s probably fair to say that we find ourselves in the middle of an anxiety epidemic at the moment. Earlier this month the Wall Street Journal had an article entitled ‘The Booming Business of American Anxiety’. The key stat was that according to a recent survey by the National Centre for Health Statistics, 27% of respondents indicated that they had symptoms of an anxiety disorder. This was up from 8% in 2019.

Between then and now of course, we’ve had Covid, the cost of living crisis and the simmering potential of nuclear war in the background.

Yet while these things no doubt have led to an increase in anxiety, people have been talking about an anxiety epidemic long before Covid. A book entitled The Anxiety Epidemic’was published in 2018 – that’s two years before Covid. In fact, an earlier book called The Anxiety Epidemic was published in 1986. A 2008 article in the Independent was entitled: ‘The anxiety epidemic: Why are children so unhappy?’ In America, a 2012 headline in the Atlantic magazine talked about a ‘National Anxiety Epidemic’. In 2016, the Observer proclaimed: ‘Only fundamental social change can defeat the anxiety epidemic’.

So while we can certainly point to potentially-anxiety increasing events over the past few years, commentators have been talking about an anxiety epidemic for quite a while.

To read the rest of this article written by Rev. Stephen Steele for a local paper, click here.