The journalist Eleanor Morgan was 17 when she had her first panic attack. She was in the middle of double biology at school, learning about mitochondria. Suddenly, the blackboard went blurry, her head started to prickle, her hands went numb and her bowels began to bubble alarmingly.
“Within seconds I was convinced I was about to detonate there on my wooden stool,” she notes in Anxiety for Beginners. “Crack down the middle, skull to pelvis, like an egg. It was a feeling with no reference point or memory to attach to it and came with the speed of a bullet train.”
Morgan was able to slip out of class and rush to the bathroom where, she says, “death became a certainty. What else, if not death, could be the end point of such physical and mental freefall?” Eventually, the symptoms passed and she went back to her lesson where no one had noticed anything unusual. But what she experienced instilled a fear in her that would never leave. “What if it happened out of nowhere again somewhere else?” she writes. “What if I couldn’t be alone? What if I died next time? What if.”
Anxiety seems a curiously mild word, given the continents of human emotion that it covers. We use it to describe nerves before an exam, jitters preceding a job interview or the trepidation that comes before a big trip abroad. Such feelings can be galvanising, a proportional and rational response to a tense, if not unusual, situation.
But for many, anxiety can be disproportionate and entirely irrational. It is a bruising, whirling panic that causes acute mental distress, is often physically debilitating and makes getting through the day an exercise in terror. It can lead to sweating, increased heart rate, chest pains, hallucinations, breathing difficulties, physical tremors and crippling shame and fear. It can ruin lives.
Morgan’s book is a powerful and beautifully written account of her experiences with anxiety and depression, and a rigorously researched examination of why they happen and how they can be managed. A third of Britons will suffer from anxiety at some point in their lives; a large proportion of those will be teenagers and young adults. As well as speaking to fellow sufferers, Morgan consults psychiatrists, psychologists, OCD specialists, gastroenterologists and nutritionists, and bones up on Kierkegaard, Freud and Hippocrates (the latter was the first to describe a patient with social anxiety).
It is with a mixture of humanity and clear-sightedness that she analyses genetic and environmental influences, trauma, hormones, fertility, parenthood, medication, social stigma and language, all the while linking back to her own stories and those of fellow sufferers.
She blithely tells of the enduring fear of losing control of her bowels, part of a phenomenon known as “catastrophising”, which prompts her to monitor exits in public places with the zeal of a secret agent. Her memory of going to see a GP during a bout of depression, during which she had lost a stone in under a fortnight, only to be told that she looked well, is threaded with fury. “Why? Why was he surprised?” she fumes. “Because I’d showered and had clean hair and clothes? Because I wasn’t sat on the chair rocking, clawing at my skin? Because I could string a sentence together? What does ‘not well in the head’ look like?”
In assuming the dual role of memoirist and investigative journalist, Morgan gradually comes to terms with her own anxiety disorder. She offers no firm answers or miracle cures, and is careful to remind us that, when it comes to mental illness, no two cases are the same. Her willingness to share what so many others strive to keep hidden, to thoroughly demystify her condition, is courageous and compelling.
Candour is similarly at the heart of columnist Bryony Gordon’s Mad Girl, a book about her struggles with mental health that is at once darkly funny and deeply serious. On the surface, Gordon has led a charmed life. She was privately educated, lived in a nice house and had a loving family. On leaving school, and after a curtailed stint at university, she landed her dream job in journalism that allowed her to interview stars and travel the world. But good fortune doesn’t immunise one from mental illness, and her account of her unravelling – as with Morgan, it seemed to come out of the blue – is shocking in its ferocity.
One day, at the age of 12, Gordon woke up convinced that she was going to die of Aids. She began washing her hands obsessively, chanting random phrases under her breath and fretting that her family was also going to die. After she revealed her fear that she might murder someone, a doctor diagnosed OCD and prescribed antidepressants.
Mad Girl recounts the double life that Gordon led for the next 15 years. For friends, lovers and colleagues she was the fun, flighty writer-about-town; privately, she was dealing with bulimia, drug dependency and devastatingly low self-esteem.
Gordon chronicles all this in the breathless, self-mocking tone that she has long employed in her newspaper columns. While her intention is doubtless to prevent us from getting too mired in misery, the effect can be jarring. Even with her relentless joie de vivre, the book is soaked with shame. “Writing this,” she says, “I realise how miserable I sound, what a dreary human being I come across as. I’m amazed you’ve actually managed to make it this far.”
But when she’s not apologising, Gordon comes over as sharp, and often charming. Her story, like Morgan’s, is a potential lifeline for others in her position who might be suffering in silence.
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