Anxiety has become a way of life for my generation. In an insecure world, is it any surprise? | Simon Copland

It always hits me in the gut first. I often feel it first thing, my stomach twisted in a knot, my brain deciding it doesn’t want to deal with the day before I even wake up.

Sometimes my anxiety will fester around a particular thing – a cascade of worry about my work, health, social life, or often a simple decision I have to make. This worry becomes totally paralysing, with hours spent focusing on nothing else but this one issue. At other times the anxiety hits for no reason, a desperate feeling of dread that I cannot explain, nor wash away no matter how much I try.

Over the past couple of years I’ve come to terms with the reality of my anxiety disorder – moving from seeing myself as someone who has anxious moments to realising I have a mental health condition.

In many ways it has been liberating, largely because in owning the illness I’ve been able to start dealing with it. I visit a psychologist, who is doing a great job at helping me manage my anxious events. Yet at the same time, recognising this problem has also been challenging. While I’ve been able to deal with the symptoms, I continue to struggle to find the cause – a process that is taking me down a rabbit hole of realisation of the depth of this illness.

Consult the growing medical discourse around anxiety and you will get an increasingly clear picture of what causes the disorder. Beyond Blue states that factors such as a genetic predisposition, personality traits, the existence of stressful events, physical health problems and substance abuse can all lead to an anxiety disorder. Other research has also found biological causes, with an imbalance of certain neurotransmitters such as serotonin, dopamine and epinephrine in the brain likely being a trigger.

This research provides an essential picture of the nature of this growing epidemic – confirming anxiety as a core mental health issue and not just an “everyday event” that we all go through. For me it has created some comfort. I have a familial history of mental health problems, and at the times when I’m inexplicably paralysed with anxious thoughts it is often useful to tell myself that my neurotransmitters are simply firing a little funny that day. Yet it’s also clear that anxiety disorders are something much bigger than a simple biological condition.

As I’ve become increasingly comfortable talking about my anxiety, one of the things that has been most striking has been the realisation of how common it is. For my cohort – Generation Y – it increasingly feels as though anxiety disorders are more common that not. The list I have of my friends with different forms of the disorder grows longer all the time, leading me to ask, why is it that this plagues so many of my generation?

I’ve managed to understand this by thinking about anxiety as a stressful event. As noted before, stressful life events – whether it is the loss of a job, the death of a family member, or the breakdown of a relationship – are one of the major causes of anxiety disorders. What’s changing is that these events are becoming a continuous existence for an entire generation. Increasing job insecurity, housing stress, economic and income instability, and a future of climate change, environmental destruction and conflict, have turned stress – and in turn anxiety – into a way of life.

Just as significant stressful events are shown to cause anxiety disorders, research suggests that this long-term stress has a similar impact. For example, research from the University of Michigan found in 2009 that stress from job insecurity is worse for your mental health than unemployment. Similar data has been found regarding housing, with research from the Swinburne-Monash Research Centre finding a strong correlation between different forms of housing insecurity and mental health problems such as anxiety. Many researchers also believe that when it comes to climate change we are undergoing “a collective anxiety that is insidious, even if we haven’t managed to connect all the dots”.

But it is even more complex than this. These material conditions are met with what Richard Eckersley calls a “western cultural crisis” – a breakdown of communal structures that are important for our mental wellbeing. Whether it is the commercialisation of public space or increasing working hours that reduce time for social activity, we live in a society in which we are all increasingly socially isolated and lonely, destroying one of the key mechanisms available to protect against mental anguish.

Anxiety disorders are not just medical problems. They are inherently social illnesses, ones that are becoming more of an issue as economic insecurity increases and social connections are destroyed.

But herein lies the challenge. Facing this epidemic we now have a dilemma. How can we deal with these huge social causes while at the same time support and protect those who are suffering from the illness here and now?

This is a fine balance, but one we have not managed to find. Michael Currie for example comments that we hardly even deal with the causes of anxiety when trying to treat it, stating that, “Anxiety-as-disease is treated much like an infection, as if the symptoms were a bacterium that should be eradicated.” NGO campaigns are very similar, with awareness programs, which dominate the sector, working primarily in an after-the-fact approach.

This is not to say that these approaches have no value. Doctors and psychologists, for example, can only deal with an illness as it is presented to them. I can say from first-hand experience these approaches are extremely useful in helping deal with the disorder.

Yet, as we face this epidemic we must also confront the social conditions behind it. Economic, income, and housing insecurity, alongside the plague of social isolation, is causing a generational mental health crisis, primarily situated in anxiety disorders. Finding long-term solutions therefore can only occur when we are willing to tackle these social causes.

I do not know exactly what this balance looks like. But if we really want to solve our anxiety epidemic we have to think of solutions that look at the causes of the problem, and not just the symptoms. Otherwise we face a whole generation or more plagued by this illness.