Why The Anxiety Become So Common Among The Young?

Why has debilitating anxiety become so common among the young? And why is it still so often overlooked? Rob Haskell reports on a health crisis in the making.

- Rob Haskell

In JUNE, a 15-year-old boy, who a few days later became my patient, rode his bike to California’s Venice Beach, laid it in the sand, and stripped down to his boxer shorts. Then he started to swim and kept swimming, following the sun as it dipped over the horizon, until the busy boardwalk sounds had faded and all he could hear was the rhythm of his gasps. The boy, whom I’ll call Joseph, explained all this to me days later, after he had been rescued, taken to a psychiatric emergency room, and discharged to his parents, Honduran immigrants who spoke little English. “I figured that eventually I would get too tired and then just basically drown,” he told me with a chilling indifference. “But typical me, I can’t even die right.”

Over the next few weeks, I learned that Joseph was beset by worries large and small. Would he ever grow taller than five feet six? Could he ever bring a girl home to see the apartment where he slept with his brother on a fold-out sofa in the living room? At school he was timid and craved only invisibility, even though in my office he was unafraid to use big, grim words (schadenfreude, lugubrious) and talk about the Margaret Atwood novel he was reading. His mother took his shyness for defiance and complained of his refusal to run simple errands for her, such as stopping by the butcher on his way home. “And he’s not friendly,” she told me. “He won’t even say hello to his aunts.” But he was soulful and handsome, and I wondered whether in a breakfast club of sophisticated misfits, a teenage tribe he never managed to locate, he might have found the courage to raise his eyes off the floor. Instead, the overwhelming impression he conveyed was of perturbation: a fish out of water, a boy pulled out of the solace of the Pacific Ocean. Joseph was suffering from an anxiety disorder that had pushed him to a dangerous brink.