One in six people in the world will suffer an anxiety disorder for at least a year during their lives.
This book is a jewel. And that, at first, is a bit arid, a bit thick. But I recommend persevering, because it immediately gets great. I mean anxiety, fear, hope and the search for inner peace (Seix Barral) by Scott Stossel, an American journalist forty who lives besieged by anxiety crises, which can attack him at any time and leave him trembling, tachycardial and unable to talk. It also suffers fear of closed spaces (claustrophobia), at the height (acrophobia), to fainting (astenophobia), to be trapped away from home (apparently it is a variant of agoraphobia or fear of open spaces), germs (Bacillophobia), to speak in public (a type of social phobia), to fly (aerophobia), to vomit (emetophobia), to vomit on an airplane, which, for him, must be like a mania square ) and, finally, it is even afraid of cheese (Turophobia), a very rare obsession that already seems to me.
As you will understand, I, that I am an anxious of manual, and that I have suffered three great crisis of clinical anguish in my life, at age 17, at 21 and at 30, I have pounced on this essay as a little pig on mud pond . And I must say that poor Scott is so catastrophic that, at the outset, his example can greatly encourage the most medium anxious. That, by the way, they are (or we are) legion. According to the latest studies in this book, it is estimated that one in six people in the world will suffer an anxiety disorder for at least a year in the course of their life.
"I know that on the other side of these pages there are many people devoured by the ogre of anguish"
And suffering an anxiety disorder is not being a bit nervous or feeling worried about a problem of your life. A clinical crisis studies and is disabled with spectacular symptoms while lasting. I remember my first anguish attack at age 17: I was watching television one night, after dinner, in the empty dining room of my parents' house, when suddenly the world moved away from me, as if I were contemplating reality to through a telescope; That is, the dining room was still there, but very far (then I knew that this is called a tunnel effect and that it is quite common); I immediately entered an absolute terror attack, with the aggravating thing that I didn't even know what I was afraid of. I was chattering my teeth, my legs were shaking, my knees broke. Like what happened to me was incomprehensible, I deduced that I had drove me crazy and that increased panic. In addition, I was unable to explain what happened to me. I couldn't talk, I couldn't communicate. Because the essence of all mental disorder is loneliness, such a colossal loneliness that is unimaginable if you do not know it, if you have not been there. A astronaut loneliness wandering lost in intergalactic space.
In Spain at the end of the sixties and in my social class, people did not go to the psychiatrist; So I passed the crisis to hair, without a single anxiolytic. I was about to enter the university and decided to do psychology to try to understand what was happening to me. In fact, I have the theory that most of the psychiatrists and psychologists are dedicated to that because, of young people, they feared to be crazy. Which, on the other hand, is not bad in itself: on the contrary, it can provide greater understanding and closeness with patients. In any case, I studied a couple of years of psychology and there I learned that the anguish crises, although spectacular, are like the flu of mental disorders; Basic, very common and, despite the suffering they produce, very slight. Knowing all this made me lose fear of fear; I already knew that the crises returned, that I was not going to be trapped there, that they were something transitory. I am accepting how it was and, I suspect, to start publishing my texts around thirty years (because writing sews you, unites you to the world), made crises end. Three decades ago I have not suffered any. They can come back. They don't feel like it, but I don't fear them. And I am even grateful to have taught me the mental exterior space, that inhospitable and terrifying place of the psychic ailment. Thing that has made me know the human being better. I count all this, as Scott tells his tremendous, overwhelming and often hilarious experiences, because I know that on the other side of these pages there are many people devoured by the ogre of anguish. People who feel lost, who believe they die, who think their head has gone forever. And that they are unable to talk about it. To me, at 17, I would have served me to tell me: baby, this is the most normal; Breathe calm and wait for it to pass. So I take advantage of Stossel's great book to say it now.