Another Age of Anxiety: Psychological Distress and the ‘Asset Economy’

Abstract

Rates of ‘anxiety disorder’ have risen rapidly in the 21st century, provoking much public debate as to the causes. However, despite attending to varieties of mental distress over its history, sociology has said little about the context of this ‘epidemic’. By contrast, the rise of depression and anti-depressants in the 1980s has been viewed by cultural theorists and critics as a distinctly neoliberal affliction, that casts light on its sociological context. Too often, both in critical and non-critical discourses, the distinction between ‘depression’ and ‘anxiety’ has been elided. The article seeks to take anxiety seriously as a distinct contemporary sociological phenomenon. To do this, it examines how anxiety has been framed in the past by existentialist and psychoanalytic traditions, then how this history was systematically eliminated by the medicalization of psychiatry. It then considers how the sociology of assets and assetization might provide an explanatory context for contemporary anxiety ‘disorders’.