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ABSTRACT
According to a national survey of incoming freshmen, the anxiety levels of college students are higher today than
at any time in the 25-year history of the survey. When Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State
University, looked at survey data from 50,000 children and college students between the 1950s and the 1990s, she
found that the average college student in the 1990s was more anxious than 85 percent of students in the 1950s
and that "[euro]'normal' schoolchildren in the 1980s reported higher levels of anxiety than child psychiatric patients
in the 1950s."
FULL TEXT
A Brief History of Anxiety
The Invention of a Modern Malaise
By Scott Stossel
In April 1869, a young doctor in New York named George Miller Beard, writing in the Boston Medical and Surgical
Journal, coined a term for what he believed to be a new and distinctively American affliction, one he had seen in 30
of his patients: neurasthenia (from neuro for "nerve" and asthenia for "weakness"). Referring to it sometimes as
"nervous exhaustion," he argued that neurasthenia afflicted primarily ambitious, upwardly mobile members of the
urban middle and upper classes-especially "the brain-workers in almost every household of the Northern and
Eastern States"-whose nervous systems were overtaxed by a rapidly modernizing American civilization. Beard
believed that he himself had suffered from neurasthenia but had overcome it in his early 20s.
Born in a small Connecticut village in 1839, Beard was the son of a Congregational minister and the grandson of a
physician. After attending prep school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, he went on to Yale, where
he began to suffer from the array of nervous symptoms that would afflict him for the next six years and that he
would later observe in his patients: ringing in the ears, pains in the side, dyspepsia, nervousness, morbid fears, and
"lack of vitality." By his own account, Beard's anxious suffering was prompted largely by his uncertainty about
what career to pursue-though there is also evidence that he anguished over his lack of religious commitment. (Two
of Beard's older brothers had followed his father into the ministry; in his diary, he chastises himself for his
indifference to spiritual concerns.) Once he decided to become a physician, however, his doubts left him and his
anxiety dissipated. He entered medical school at Yale in 1862, determined to help others plagued by the anxious
suffering that had once afflicted him.
Influenced by Darwin's recent work on natural selection, Beard came to believe that cultural and technological
evolution had outstripped biological evolution, putting enormous stress on the human animal-particularly those in
the business and professional classes, who were most driven by status competition and the burgeoning pressures
of capitalism. Even as technological development and economic growth were improving material well-being, the
pressure of market competition-along with the uncertainty that took hold as the familiar verities fell away under
the assault of modernity and industrialization-produced great emotional stress, draining American workers' stock
of "nerve force" and leading to acute anxiety and nervous prostration.
Beard believed that constant change, combined with the relentless striving for achievement, money, and status
DETAILS
Volume: 38
Issue: 5
Publication subject: Drug Abuse And Alcoholism, Psychology, Social Services And Welfare
ISSN: 1535573X
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