Anxiety monster defanged

BASYA LAYE

“Anxiety compels a person to think, but it is the type of thinking that gives thinking a bad name: solipsistic, self-eviscerating, unrelenting, vicious,” writes New York-based author and journalist Daniel Smith in the introduction to Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety (Simon and Schuster, 2012). The author of Muses, Madmen and Prophets: Hearing Voices and the Borders of Sanity (Penguin Books, 2008), Smith’s latest book is an irreverent, warm, laugh-out-loud funny and, at times, painful account of his life with chronic anxiety.

Anxiety is a normal and universal condition; we all worry. A healthy dose of anxiety keeps us from running into traffic, it helps us invest our money prudently and perform well on exams. Our nervous systems have evolved to weed out the dangerous from the safe but sometimes this process gets corrupted and becomes anxiety writ large; an overwhelming, sweaty, dizzying collapse of reason, featuring sweaty palms, upset stomachs, headaches, nausea, confusion and panic attacks. Anxiety that has crossed into disordered territory can keep even the friendliest person homebound and the smartest from completing a college degree, and life can become significantly impaired. Treatment seeks to de-escalate this automatic autonomic response, and sufferers can use various forms of therapy to learn effective interventions or choose to add pharmaceutical options for anxiety gone awry.

World Mental Health Day, which was marked this week, offered another opportunity to reflect on the most common psychiatric disorder in North America, with at least 12 percent of the population of Canada experiencing an anxiety disorder within any given year. Add to that statistic that anxiety is often co-morbid with other psychiatric diagnoses, including depression, alcohol and substance abuse, and the costs, physical, psychological, economic and otherwise are enormous. It is also highly treatable.

After a move to Portland, Ore., failed to materialize when the economic downturn hit and the promise of a job disappeared, Smith began working on Monkey Mind, but the idea for the memoir had been kicking around for some time. He described the book’s beginnings in an interview with the Independent.

“I’ve always thought about the idea of writing a book about anxiety, but I didn’t really want to. I wasn’t a great fan of the memoir form and the book I’d been working on was a novel ... but I needed something, and I knew that I could sell it; I knew that it was a good idea because no one had really done it before, strangely. This surprised me. I hammered out a book proposal in, like, three weeks in my friend’s apartment and sold it for very little money, because my first book got a lot of attention but sold about 11 copies, nine of them to my mother.... So, in the end, I’m glad that it happened because it was one of the few marginally pleasant writing experiences of my life.”

On his website, Smith explains his purpose in writing the book: “What I set out to do in Monkey Mind was to describe and explain the experience of anxiety. Anxiety is often spoken of in cultural and collective terms: we are living, it is said, in an ‘age of anxiety.’ But what does anxiety feel like? How does it affect everyday life?”

Monkey Mind contains an informative short history of anxiety, and traces how various philosophers, scientists and literary giants have viewed the disorder through the ages. Smith isn’t salacious with the details – though the book does contain many a potentially embarrassing anecdote – and his engaging and unembellished style tempers some of the more challenging episodes described. And, while promoting a memoir about anxiety might strike fear into most people’s hearts, Smith is clear that the effects of publishing Monkey Mind have been mostly positive, healthy even.

“For the most part, I don’t fear embarrassment or degradation of people’s estimation of me and my character,” he said. “So, there are a few different answers,” he later added. “One is that it doesn’t feel like me being exposed. It feels like the narrator being exposed. There is something of a difference. The book is very honest. I am that anxious, or have been that anxious, but it’s a memoir, and that means that it’s selective, it’s not me in entirety, it’s me as refracted through this single experience. And, maybe that’s just a rationalization, an authorial rationalization ... it’s an artifact, it’s a book, it’s a piece of writing.”

Smith did not intend for Monkey Mind to be didactic or to be considered as a candidate for the self-help genre, but he said he has been humbled by the response he’s received, and the extent to which readers want to share their own experiences.

“I wasn’t writing the book with the intent of saving people,” he said. “I mean, I wrote the book with the intent of writing a good book. I wasn’t writing it in order to be people’s therapist or to testify. I wrote it for literary reasons and because I was engaged by the theme, engaged by the narrative, engaged by the writing. But, that said, it’s been really lovely. It seems to me, I could be wrong, that there’s this groundswell of interest in the subject and a real hunger for a book of this sort, one that openly declares the presence of chronic anxiety and that describes it in minute, sort of painful, detail, but humorously, not despairingly. When I wrote this piece for the New York Times to open their anxiety series – and flooded would be an exaggeration – but I got a lot of e-mails from people saying, ‘When is this book coming out? Why do I have to wait until July? I’ve been waiting for something like this!’”

Based on the response he’s received, Smith said he would be gratified if the book found a place on the shelves of mental health professionals to offer to their clients. As well, Smith has set up a website devoted to anxiety, monkeymindchronicles.com, which features more of his writing, videos and various mental health resources.

Teaching memoir writing has also opened up other possibilities for the book.

“It really messes you up to teach writing, because one of the questions they ask is, what is the purpose of literature, basically?” he laughed. “One doesn’t think about that so much when one is writing or when one is reading, but I was reminded in talking to this very anxious student, I think it’s Lincoln’s first inaugural speech, he uses this image of a cord, the connection between the patriot graves, Civil War soldiers and the hearts of every citizen. I’m mangling the hell out of it, but anyways, the point is that there were these tendrils of connection ... and what I said to her was, like, that’s basically the only job. Don’t think so preciously about it. What you’re trying to do is communicate. You’re not a jeweller. It’s written speech. You’re trying to connect in some way, by any means necessary. Life is lonely, and one of the great purposes of literature, of great books, is to form connections with people who you’re not in the same room as, and to serve that function of some conduit of fellow feeling, of empathy. So, when I say I didn’t mean it to be salutary, I think I meant that I didn’t mean it to be a self-help book.

“When I wrote the proposal, there was a sort of, didactic might not be the right word, but something like that purpose that I enumerated, which was that people think of anxiety as this kind of many-fanged beast, and the fact is that it feels like that sometimes, but what one discovers when one really looks closely at the experience and learns about how it operates in your own head and in your own body is it’s really just an absurd asshole, it’s just such a ridiculous son-of-a-bitch!”

That Jews have been associated with anxiety is news to no one, but Smith believes that this is not an obvious – or correct – assumption to make. He writes briefly about this association in the memoir, as well as delving briefly into his own Jewish identity. Religion, Smith noted, can have a salutary effect.

“That’s the argument for the contemporary flourishing of anxiety, that there’re all these options, none of which are definitive, and to have definitive options, I suspect, would be bracing, psychologically and emotionally bracing; at the expense, however, at the risk of rigid, ossified ways of thinking about the world,” he said.

“The role of ritual and tradition should not be overlooked, however. It, in fact, might be useful to be more observant and to have had that. I can imagine that feeling ... the Sabbath is a wonderful and wise practice, to pause once a week and to step out of the buzz of it all can only be a good thing and I know that when I do this in the form of meditation, when I step out of my life, shut off the phone and go into a quiet room and sit on the zafu and, for a couple of minutes, just breathe, that’s wonderful. As well as a sense of community,” he continued. “One thing about organized religion of which I’m envious is church or temple, synagogue, the sense of community, of a pre-made community of your peers; that, too, is bracing as a sort of bulwark against the sort of lunacy of being in your own head. Because anxiety it’s not narcissism, it’s solipsism. You’re caught inside the walls of your own skull. Anything that takes you out of that, as long as it doesn’t make you stupid, is wonderful.”

The assumption that Jews are the most anxious people is not borne out by the facts, Smith said. “If you ask anyone of any nationality who the most anxious, screwed-up, indecisive people in the world are, they’ll almost always point to their parents and aunts and uncles and their cousins,” Smith explained. Any minority group that is experiencing upward socioeconomic mobility will exhibit high degrees of anxiety, he added. “In the first generation of socioeconomic rising, two things happen: you become really good at boxing.... You also get good at self-deprecatory humor. But Jews have always had ... this kind of ‘we are the champions’ vibe with anxiety.... Jews have been great at representing themselves as anxious. Anything from Fiddler on the Roof to the Jewish Coen brothers’ movies, that sort of weak-willed and vacillating [stereotype], to Roth’s Portnoy, to any Woody Allen.... The question is why. I sort of develop what I think are the reasons. And, again, it’s a kind of ‘you can’t fire me, I quit!’ kind of thing,” an expression of pride closely linked to a talmudic tradition of “endless analysis and uncertainty.”

However, that “neurotic Jew image is sort of very closely related to the Jew in the antisemitic imagination, so there’s something about reclaiming it,” Smith added. “But it’s also self-flattering to some extent, because anxiety is so closely aligned with thought, it is a way of telegraphing a sort of celebration of intelligence. As you were talking, I was thinking about something that I just read, in the James Atlas biography of Saul Bellow. Bellow really had a lot of problems with Hemingway. What he disliked about Hemingway, what he found offensive about Hemingway, is that Hemingway equated courage with action, with physical action. And Bellow thought that there was great courage – Bellow, who came out of the talmudic tradition, whose ancestors were rabbis – believed that there was something incredibly courageous about introspection and, in many ways, far more courageous. That it takes more courage to sit and know thyself than it does to step into a bull-fighting ring and, in fact, Bellow lived to be 90-something and Hemingway blew his brains out in his 50s. There’s something to that in anxiety. I mean, I don’t want to go all the way, that was Kierkegaard’s thing of the nobility of anxiety ... but those of us who train ourselves in thinking, there’s a risk involved in that.”

The problem with identifying anxiety so proudly with analysis and thinking, however, is “that it’s very often undisciplined thinking, it’s illogical and, as my therapist would put it, as a cognitive behaviorist would put it, maladaptive,” said Smith. “I think why there’s this tradition of the neurotic Jew figure ... it’s an exhibition of pride in some way. You know, you want to call us head-bound and lacking in virility? Screw you! We’ll take it to the max! If anxiety is rooted in excessive intellectual activity then, by extension, it’s also rooted in excessive intelligence, so to sort of adopt that neurotic tradition and to accept that stereotype is a kind of backhanded way of saying we’re the smartest tribe in existence. It’s sort of a way of claiming mental power. There’s nobility in [that]. Contradictions are important; who wants to be lacking in self-contradictions? Who wants to be that boring? The containing of multitudes is a positive thing.”

For more information on anxiety and treatment options, visit anxietybc.com or anxietycanada.ca.

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