Book Review: America the Anxious

[osprey_archer]

wordsofastory hooked me up with Netgalley, which is a place where book reviewers (even book reviewers on a quite modest scale like myself) can get galleys of upcoming books for freeeeeeeeeeee, so of course I spent a large proportion of yesterday evening going through it looking for books that I wanted to read.

The first one I actually settled down and did read was Ruth Whippman's America the Anxious: How Our Pursuit of Happiness is Creating a Nation of Nervous Wrecks, which turned out to be a good place to start. It's a good, breezy introduction to the American cult of happiness, with just enough memoir to keep it moving but not so much that the memoir ever overpowered Whippman's research, the main gist of which seems to be that there is something creepy and victim-blamy about the more rah-rah power of positive thinking "If you're not happy it's because you're not trying hard enough!" side of the American search for happiness.

If there's one thing we do know about happiness - and there may in fact only be one thing; as Whippman notes, we don't seem to understand happiness very well - it's that "our happiness depends on other people" (italicized in the original), which is a bit of a bummer if you want to pull yourself up by your happiness bootstraps but kind of a relief if the bootstraps snapped sometime last November. We don't have to do this on our own! In fact we can't do it on our own! Hooray!

And in fact, as Whippman points out, making happiness our preeminent goal in life will probably backfire anyway, because it's "so elusive and hard to define, it's impossible to pinpoint when it's even been reached, a recipe for anxiety." Hence one of the reasons for the sky-rocketing levels of anxiety and depression in America.

(The book did make me wonder a bit if our whole approach to treating anxiety as a public health issue is wrong, because we treat it as an individual problem that requires an individual solution rather than an individual problem indicating a larger societal problem that needs fixing. As if, basically, we were treating cholera as if it were the result of individual intestinal issues, rather than seeing it as indicative of a contaminated water supply somewhere.

However, fixing catastrophically low levels of social connectedness is a bit more difficult than plugging a contaminated water pump, and I certainly wouldn't know where to start on a societal level.)

But getting back to the book. Whippman also spends a chapter with the Mormons! I love Mormons. Actually I love reading about intense religious groups in general: Hasidic Jews, evangelical Christians, snake-handling Baptists, the Amish, anyone.

Whipmann notes that the Mormons are both the happiest people in America and the most depressed, which she puzzles over at first before realizing it actually makes sense provided you realize that you're talking about two different subgroups of Mormons here: the church has fairly rigid guidelines for how to be a good man or a good woman (and they are rigidly gendered guidelines too), so people who fit fairly naturally within those guidelines will feel especially happy - not only are they living a life they enjoy that their community approves, but they also won't be tormented by the question "is this my BEST life?" that bedevils secular folk, because the church says that yes, yes it is - while people who don't fit are going to feel guilty and terrible and depressed.

A quick, interesting read. It probably won't blow your mind (unless you're big on the Power of Positive Thinking, I guess), but I quite enjoyed it.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

You are an excellent person to be hooked into Netgalley. Anyone who is lucky enough to snag you for a reviewer ... is very lucky!

(Enjoyed this review very much, and I agree with your insights and speculations)

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I am sitting here waiting for three books to be approved thinking "send them to me, Netgalley, send them to meeeeee!"

One of them is a sequel to The Secret Garden set during World War II. I cannot tell you how much I covet this book.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I can imagine how much you want it!

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

This is the ONE BOOK they have not yet approved me for. Come on, Netgalley! Let me have it!

[morbane.livejournal.com]

That sounds really interesting - and particularly the point about the problem of individually treating a societal ill.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

That part is really more my musing than something that is in the book itself, although I certainly think that it's implied by the book's emphasis on the fact that only community and social connection make us truly happy. You can't self-help your way into a sense of community - it's not self-help anymore if you're enlisting all your friends to help, after all.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

I'm so glad NetGalley is working out for you! Good luck with your other requests.

This sounds like a really fascinating book – the point about Mormons makes sense, but I never would have thought of it!

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking I may have to set aside a specific time each month to look over NetGalley's offerings, because otherwise I'm going to spend all this time over there browsing and request far more books than I could possibly read.

I liked the book a lot! The chapter about Mormons was an unexpected bonus.

[summercomfort]

Wow, sounds like an interesting read, and thanks for the review! It is making me have thinky thoughts. Going along with your idea about the problem of treating the individual rather than society, wouldn't it also make sense to treat the individual by prescribing more interactions with other people? Like, why is anxiety and depression something that's treated privately (and often a thing to hide?)

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Totally cynical answer: it's harder to make money off a prescription for "see your friends more often/join a club/get a roommate" than for medication/more therapy sessions.

Less cynically, I think it's easier to prescribe a pill/therapy because that's the sort of thing we expect from medical professionals, whereas "join a hiking club!" or whatever seems less like a prescription and more like a piece of slightly weird advice.

And also I think there's a sense that prescribing someone to see their friends more often isn't treating the problem seriously - that unless doctors prescribe something to treat the chemical imbalance in the brain, then clearly they don't consider the patient's mental health condition to be real.

Except everything we do affects our brain chemistry, and if the underlying problem is social isolation that makes someone's brain go "WE ARE ALL ALONE AND DEFENSELESS AGAINST POSSIBLE ATTACKS BY SABERTOOTH TIGERS AAAAH," then there's probably only so much pills can do to fix that.