Life isn't a pathology: random thoughts after pastoral care of anxious students

Ours has been called an age of anxiety.

But are we now more acutely anxious than ever before? The pandemic certainly seems to have amped up the most common 'mental illness' of the 21st century. But hasn't the vulnerable human species always been living with anxiety? Not just humans, either--anxiety is common to all biological forms. Anxiety responses can be detected and measured in every life form, from a bacteria to a bird to a bee to a tree.

Any life form scans for threats all the time

Why? Because evolution. Living organisms have had 1.4 billion years' practice in being constantly on sentry duty, monitoring their environment for threats. Our late-evolved, highly-developed brains need only a nanosecond to home in on any anomaly in our scope and begin evaluating it, preparing to take evasive, life-preserving actions--freeze, faff, flight, flee. As it is doing this, other higher-brain capacities are either switched off or minimized--rationality, compassion, etc., get put on hold. Anxiety is biological, natural. Anxiety is inherent in living on this planet, and healthy anxiety has served us well for most of our evolution as a species. It has been a rational response to detecting threats and planning responses to replicate our DNA. Our ancestors spent eons as prey to teach us this, and we have learned it, but good.

But an extra dimension has been added to the threat environment. The current information age bombards us now with new universes of data that didn't exist before, giving us an entirely new field of reality to scan and react to, looking for threats to fixes, or looking for allies to resonate with. COVID has taken information to yet another level, to the point where some desperate people genuinely consider drinking bleach for a moment, just to make it all go away. Our natural sentry duty is now on crack--twitchy with hypervigilance.

Yes, it has got a lot more threatening in the past 15 years

So no amount of Prozac, CBT, lying-on-the-most-expensive-couches, crystal healing or essential oils will do anything but manage the symptoms of anxiety. None of them address the root causes that are tied up with natural life-on-earth, and certainly not with life-in-the-world-we've-made. They may only get you propped back up to get back to work. It's kind of what they're for. The socio-economic order demands a quick fix. We may treat individuals, but the causes are often social and environmental. The system in pressuring us to 'just cope and deal with it' creates another layer of things to be anxious about--what if I can't cope? In late stage capitalism, that's pretty much a death sentence--you don't get to earn, you have no right to live, and certainly no right to be happy.

No sane person thinks this.

In this crazy-making context, only psychopaths would feel fine. It is no sign of health to be well adjusted to a world where we are geared to scan for destruction, or to a culture, making itself sick with a media storm of things to worry about. There is no cure for life on earth in 2020.

The young people who come into my office to share their troubles, seem gripped and paralyzed by an extreme anxiety that cannot be explained by their circumstances. They are physically healthy, doing okay academically, have social networks, have families that look after them, so they get regular meals, suburban peace, comforts, treats, luxuries, even. They're not on meth but many are certainly on meds. Nevertheless, they are in an inchoate and generalized and intractable pain. If it is true that the young more readily embody society's vulnerabilities, we are in deep trouble, and these troubles can't be cured by considering them a 'disorder' to treat, or by strategizing some new, inventive coping mechanisms so their parents won't be inconvenienced by their inability to function, and so a private school's brand is not damaged.

Who functions well in the world we've made? 

Yet they are certainly "ill", because their anxiety is such that they cannot function. But who says they have to function in this mess? If we are only concerned with their ability function socially, we are betraying that our children have become some kind of totem, an emblem in the narcissistic game of who is the awesomest parent, displaying their awesomeness through getting their kid into the bestest school. And from this too, anxious students get the message that life is a battle, not just of biology, but of social rank and pecking order and invented standards of achievement. All these hand-wring, tear-squeezing students actually want is to be loved for who they are, not for the scholastic tricks they can pull.

Maybe we should listen to the wisdom of their extreme response and adapt to a wiser relationship to both natural and maladaptive anxiety. Anxiety is, after all, a sign of empathy, compassion, feeling. It says "I care, I am awake and aware. I am engaged in life." Anxiety is not to be got rid of, because living in the world is not a pathology. We cannot 'cure' a natural process. It has a place in the world and is useful to us, but must be moderated. We need to make friends with it, so to speak--understand is roots, acknowledge its usefulness, hear and respond to the dispatches from the front our troubled youth are sending us about life at the extreme end of threat.

Kids need your love not your judgement

And keep anxiety in some perspective. 3 out of 4 people do not have anxiety to the point of illness. What makes them resilient? It's useful to remember that there are fewer suicides and less depression generally when there's a war going on. This suggests that clarity and commitment to an urgent larger purpose, especially one that connects you to others,  lowers anxiety. There's research to suggest that after 9/11, morale for many mentally ill Americans actually improved because they were able to identify what was important to them and adapted their lives and relationships accordingly. Some lives do actually improve after trauma, responding with humor, resilience, and community bonding. In short, anxiety is how your society allows you to respond to it. Extreme anxiety is a compounded condition--being anxious about being anxious. The first thing Jesus usually said before he healed people was : "Be not afraid."

Whose fear is it really anyway, your or theirs?

A collective evolution of our consciousness is called for in the age of anxiety, the kind prophesied by the religious wisdom of the ages--purpose, love, connection, larger perspective.  We can define ourselves by what we choose to be afraid of. So maybe we should choose better things to fear than fear itself. Which means we need to love our anxiety-prone fellows, allow them to feel their feelings so that they need not fear feeling them. And worry a bit less about how well they adapt to a sick social order. And maybe even do what we can to create a more compassionate social order where the vulnerable are not told to 'just deal with it'.