The
Age Of Anxiety Redux
By William Fisher
20 March, 2006
Countercurrents.org
Airplanes
crashing into buildings. Daily body counts from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Hospitals filled with hideously mutilated young service men and women.
Prisoners being tortured and abused. People being beheaded. Religious
leaders urging us to “take out” heads of state. Katrina
survivors stranded on rooftops while FEMA fiddles. Tsunami victims stranded
nowhere -- just gone.
These are only a few of the
kinds of grisly images bombarding the American people every day.
To which we can add the 24/7
menu of relentless television alarums: 90-mile-an-hour car chases, online
child pornographers getting busted, corporate executives and congressmen
being frog-walked to the slammer in handcuffs, judges receiving death
threats, murdered children found in shallow graves, millions dead and
displaced in Darfur, children dying from HIV-AIDS and many totally curable
diseases, ports being turned over to ‘Muslim terrorists’,
phone calls and emails being intercepted, and on and on and on.
And, as a not-so-delicate
counterpoint to this scary dirge, the secretary of Health and Human
Service tells us to buy extra cans of tunafish and powdered milk to
put under our beds to ward off an avian flu pandemic, and the president
exhorts us yet again to “stay the course”, go about our
business as usual, but be sure to pay attention to the brainless haute
couture color codes intended to tell us how scared we should be on any
given day.
There is an old axiom in
the news business: “If it bleeds, it leads.” So the blood
and gore is nothing new. What’s new is its sheer volume and pervasiveness.
And if anyone still believes it’s not having a profound and profoundly
negative effect on the lives of ordinary Americans, we ought to ask
them what they’ve been smoking.
This is not pop-psych 101. This is real. We are living though an age
of high anxiety (for which the government’s favorite cliché
is “the post-9/11 environment”) that is likely to have a
very long-lasting effect on the American psyche.
One of the public’s
responses to that post 9/11 environment is popping pills. Since that
dreadful day, there has been a rapid and dramatic increase in sales
of anti-anxiety, anti-depressant, and sleep aid drugs, according to
one Atlanta-based health information service provider, NDC Health, which
tracks retail pharmaceutical sales.
New prescriptions for sleep
aid rose 27.5%. Anti-anxiety drug prescriptions are up 25% and anti-depressants
up 17%. New prescriptions for anti-anxiety drugs and anti-depressants
are up 13%, while sleep aid prescriptions are up 8%. Nationwide, anti-anxiety
prescriptions are up 8.6%, anti-depressants up 2.6%, and sleep aids
up 7.5%.
Therapists are reporting
agitation, sleeplessness, survivor guilt and depression -- and not just
among those directly affected by the attacks on the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon. A New York psychiatrist says her practice increased
by 25% since September 11 and that half of those patients had no direct
connection to the attacks. "These people feel they have no control
over their lives," she said. Another shrink reports that his practice
increased by 50% since the attacks and that he didn't expect it to fall
off anytime soon.
But many other medical authorities
report that the sorry state of the nation’s mental health is deteriorating
for reasons that reach far beyond 9/11. And far beyond World Trade Center
and the Pentagon. In large and small, urban and rural communities in
places like Kansas and Arkansas and Maine, citizens find themselves
trying to live “old normal” lives but are unable to find
respite from the low-level but persistent environment of fear, anxiety,
and conflict that has come to be known as the ‘new normal’.
We all recall Karl Rove’s
cynical observation that 9/11 would be a boffo campaign issue in the
2004 election. And it was. Now, equally cynical politicians from both
sides of the aisle are using and will continue to use the “new
normal” to divide us. Nation against nation. Left against right.
Interest group against interest group. Church against State. Religion
against religion. Immigrants against citizens.
When President Bush was elected
(sic) in 2000, he promised to unite us through “compassionate
conservatism”. Since when he has worked tirelessly to unite only
his base. The result has been what John Edwards calls the “Two
Americas”.
Many Americans are trying
to cope by popping more pills.
But some of us continue to
harbor some faint hope that by 2006 or 2008, the loyal opposition will
come together with some manifesto that goes beyond “anyone but
Bush”.
If they fail, we will all
continue to live in fear. And pop more pills.
Published with the permission
of Truthout.org