Author: Noah Berman / Source: did you know?
In the last 100 years, enormous strides have been made in medicine – antibiotics, blood transfusions and pacemakers are all innovations of the 20th century. And while there have been major moves forward in diagnosing and treating physical illness, the way we manage mental illness has not made quite the same progress.
Perhaps because it is invisible, mental illness, particularly mental illnesses that do not place an unconquerable burden on day-to-day life, is often dismissed. Anxiety disorders, the most common mental illness, affect tens of millions of people every year – around 1/3 of the American population suffers from an anxiety disorder at some point in their life– and yet they are often treated by the unaffected as simple inconveniences. Let me be clear: vast bodies of research show that they are not simple inconveniences. Even for the highest-functioning victims of anxiety disorders, they can and do have drastic affects on people’s lives.
So many people deal with anxiety in some form, almost every person in the US is touched by it at some point. Given how important it is, and how much misinformation is out there, let’s take a moment to correct the record on a few things.
Myth #1: Anxious people just need to stop worrying so much.
If only it were so easy. Unfortunately, that’s not really how this works. In fact, the primary symptom that distinguishes Generalized Anxiety Disorder, a type of anxiety, is “uncontrollable worry“. If it…
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