🎧 Listen to Sarah read this installment of Cured.
A white, speckly light flashes across my line of vision. Soon, I can only make out part of the computer screen and the talking points I’m writing up. A migraine I don’t have time for.
I go for a walk. After a mile, the aura fades and is replaced by what feels like a dense plate in the center of my chest making it hard to breathe. Bikers speed by me too fast. The trucks on the street are too loud. The dense grey plate in my chest expands and shifts, making it feel like a shard of glass is cutting my chest.
I’ve been invited on National Public Radio to discuss my memoir Pathological. Two people will be joining me: Thomas Insel, former director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and Paul Appelbaum, director of the Steering Committee of The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). While preparing for the interview, I assume Appelbaum will respond to me and my book negatively, given that I heavily criticize the DSM.
For days, migraines with auras and panic attacks the intensity of which I’ve never known come and go. Tom Insel and I did another interview together, and he’s been very supportive of my work; I’ve never met Paul Appelbaum and my mind paints him as an enemy. He isn’t, of course. I have great respect for him. His specialty is ethics in psychiatry. He’s about as upstanding a psychiatrist as one can find.
The cut-glass feeling turns into an unsettling vibration. This is an emotion: anxiety. Or panic.
I thought mental health recovery would mean being immune to painful emotions, especially anxiety. Mental health is actually the ability to fully feel those emotions and keep going.
*
Researchers and mental health professionals refer to state versus trait anxiety. State anxiety is passing anxiety in response to a situation. Trait anxiety stays with you, always under the surface. For some, trait anxiety can be debilitating. It leads forty million Americans to get professional help and a diagnosis of anxiety disorder each year.
The etymology is telling. Anxiety stems from the Latin verb angor, meaning to constrict. Some languages equate it with anguish while others see the two—anxiety, anguish—as different: anxiety is a mental state like worry whereas anguish is a physical feeling that results from such worry. The American Psychological Association defines it as “characterized by feelings of tension, worried thoughts, and physical changes like increased blood pressure”—which makes it sound tame.
Many have written powerfully about living with debilitating anxiety, like Scott Stossel in My Age of Anxiety, describing it as an all-encompassing physiological, mental, and emotional torment.
We try to avoid anxiety—eat, drink alcohol, numb out with drugs, shop online, binge on Netflix—but historically, it’s been seen as a normal, human, even beneficial emotion. To the existentialists, it was an essential part of our humanness. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard thought it was crucial for success in life: “Whoever is educated by anxiety is educated by possibility.” Studies have since shown this to be true. Anxiety actually makes us perform better. It motivates us.
Evolutionarily speaking, it’s vital. As leading anxiety researcher David Barlow puts it, without it, “[t]he performance of athletes, entertainers, executives, artisans, and students would suffer; creativity would diminish; crops might not be planted. And we would all achieve that idyllic state long sought after in our fast-paced society of whiling away our lives under a shade tree. This would be as deadly for the species as nuclear war.”
To read or listen to the complete Cured, choose the discounted annual subscription for $30—about the price of a hardcover book. Each purchase brings awareness to mental health recovery.
You can also gift ‘Cured’ to someone in need.