Life Stories #60: Scott Stossel

Scott Stossel has been plagued by anxiety since early childhood--for more than a quarter-century, he's tried just about every therapeutic technique, every new medication. In My Age of Anxiety, he writes with candor about the effect anxiety disorder has had on his life... but he also opens the lens much wider, to consider how the medical and psychiatric communities, and the culture at large, have regarded and attempted to address this condition. We discuss that history, and why Stossel's therapist encouraged him to tackle this topic as a way of proving to himself that he's much more resilient than he gives himself credit for... and whether that worked.

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photo: Michael Lionstar

This episode of Life Stories is a slight deviation from the usual format of talking to memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, in that Scott Stossel’s My Age of Anxiety isn’t, strictly speaking a memoir. But one of the first things we discuss is how, once Stossel started telling people that he was writing a medical and cultural history of the diagnosis and treatment of anxiety disorders framed by his own experiences, they became much more intrigued by the topic. And the finished book is thoroughly suffused with Stossel’s life story, as he lays bare his worst phobias, the effect that they’ve had on his life, and the ways that he and his therapists have sought to bring them under control over the decades.

We met just a few days after Michael Bay’s walk-off in the middle of a trade show presentation when the teleprompter went off track—to Stossel, it sounded like a nightmare he’s lived through before, when his anxiety gets so amped up he just have to leave. The fear associated with public speaking is so great that, as he writes, he has to begin bracing himself hours ahead of time with a regimen of pills and scotch or vodka—not, he concedes, a solution he’d recommend to anyone, but one that enables him to function. Recently, though, he contemplated a change:

“My plan all along has been to do my pre-game regimen, as it were, to make sure I’m appropriately medicated. But, given the topic of the book, at some point I probably oughta try doing it, in effect, pharmacologically naked… to not take anti-anxiety medications, not take a shot of alcohol beforehand. With the thing being, maybe I’ll manage it just fine, and that would be great for me, and people may then wonder, ‘Wait, you don’t seem that anxious,’ which is what they say all the time, or maybe I’ll have a visible manifestation of my anxiety, in which case what I hope I’ll be able to do is say, ‘Well, at least you’re getting your money’s worth, ’cause you can see, this is what it’s like.'”

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