Anxiety Epidemic
Thirty years ago, it was estimated that less than five percent of the population had an anxiety disorder. Today, some estimates are over fifty percent, a tenfold increase. Is this dramatic rise evidence of a real medical epidemic?
In All We Have to Fear, Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield argue that psychiatry itself has largely generated this “epidemic” by inflating many natural fears into psychiatric disorders, leading to the over-diagnosis of anxiety disorders and the over-prescription of anxiety-reducing drugs.
More on anxiety disorders’ escalating numbers. See our previous post on the issue.
This is making me anxious, just reading about it.
As Franklin Delano Roosevelt once said… “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself!”
Maybe he should have said… “The only thing we have to fear is privileged, elitist presidents who want to scrap the constitution, expand the power of the state, and turn the republic into a socialist utopia; Oh, and the fear mongers who perpetuate fear – and pander to our petty anxieties – as a way to enrich their industry and feather their own nests!”
The psychiatric establishment has done a lot to push a medical model to normal, rational behavior. Sadness is now depression and fear is now anxiety. It wasnt that long ago that homosexuality was in the DSM as a mental disorder as well. We will medicate anything as a disease now.
I’ve been saying this for the longest time.
ADD and autism are probably over-diagnosed as well.