You feel IT
Regret, Hunger, Fear, Pain, Loss, Helplessness?
Naw, just a little anxiety...Below are some excerpts from this article from AFP
via the excellent Raw Story
Chicago-based psychologist Nancy Molitor told AFP the numbers of people seeking help because of finance-related anxiety had skyrocketed.
"In my 20 years of practice I have never seen anything like this, the anxiety is through the roof," Molitor told AFP, estimating she had seen a 50-percent increase in volume of calls.
The sense of bewilderment caused by financial crisis was comparable to the effect of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Molitor said, impacting people of varying ages and backgrounds.
"This compares to 9/11 in terms of the impact, definitely. And it's significant that it isn't a Wall Street crisis as I see it -- it's affecting the entire consumer economy, and almost every individual that I see.
"It's not just affecting adults, it's affecting the children. I had one 14-year-old who came to see me and said 'I'm worried my parents are going to go broke, because they're arguing more.'
"It's filtered down to almost every household I deal with. I've never seen something that has affected such a wide range of people."
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Judith Bardwick, a professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego, said the tidal wave of grim economic headlines had exacerbated widespread feelings of impotence in an era of job insecurity.
"It is a sense of fear, depression and anxiety that says no matter how hard or well I work, I have no control over my future," Bardwick said. "So the present stinks and the future will be worse. And there's no one to help me."
The fact that the macroeconomic causes of the meltdown were not easily explained added to the sense of impotence, Molitor said.
"It's a perfect storm because what breeds anxiety is a fear of the unknown," she explained. "I had a very bright person with a PhD in economics who said to me 'Even I don't get it. And if I don't get it, how is the average person managing a household supposed to get it?'"
"There's a sense of total helplessness, which if it goes on long enough becomes hopelessness. And if that goes on long enough it becomes depression."
Here we have a problem with anxiety and depression because we can't make payments on our stuff. Perhaps the anxiety would disappear if we had to worry about starvation, landmines, cluster bombs, disease and other senseless suffering that most the developing world deals with everyday.
We should be Thankful,
and Eat the Pie
6 comments:
Wow, I didn't realize there were so many Ronnie James Dio fans in America.
Sadly, a monumental catastrophe will probably have to happen before we make fundamental changes to our social DNA.
M Yu, I don't know who you are, what you look like, how much you possess, what you do for a living. But I do know this: if you're a heterosexual male, when my present husband dies, I would choose you for my next one if I could. The human who composed this post, well, I'm in love with that person. Amazing.
Thanks BE...
m.yu-
pick the music you think fits this best and I will make it a movie. My e-mail is jesswundrun at gmail dot com.
Your work is incredible.
And the apathy is the plan. The government is after all, sending people too poor to by a converter box for HDTV on their own a $40.00 coupon. It's all about keeping people passive and detached.
The whole point of easy credit is to make people think they are better off than they actually are and bind them in an indentured state all their lives. Maybe the current 'anxiety' is just cultural dissonance; the anxiety produced by the conflict between everything a person has been told and believes to be true and the nature of reality as revealed by their senses.
I am reminded of nothing so much as the movie "They Live" as a simile to what is happening to people today.
Your article was excellent and moving. Your image juxtaposition was jarring, wrenching. Thanks.
Well, that just knocked me on my ass.
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