A critical study of America's tranquilizer culture ranges from the 1950s to the present day as it looks at Americans' increasing dependence on pills and prescriptions to ensure peace of mind, traces the growth of the billion-dollar anti-anxiety business, and assesses the economic, cultural, and social influence of pharmaceuticals.

The Age of Anxiety is a great rock novel, but that is one of the less important things about it. The narrator is a brilliant creation - cultured, witty and unreliable. The novel captures the craziness of the music business and displays Pete Townshend's sly sense of humour and sharp ear for dialogue. First conceived as an opera, The Age of Anxiety deals with mythic and operatic themes including a maze, divine madness and long-lost children. Hallucinations and soundscapes haunt this novel, which on one level is an extended meditation on manic genius and the dark art of creativity.

Best Spiritual Books of 2018 - Spirituality & Practice Zen wisdom for identifying the causes of mental and emotional anxiety epidemic in today's world and for finding the path to a peaceful heart in the midst of them--a path that leads directly though the center of the anxiety we're trying to escape. Wrestling with fear doesn’t have to be a negative experience. This book offers an approach to life that unlocks a new way of thinking and being in the world, one that leads directly through the center of the anxieties we seek to avoid. Written in the style of an owner’s manual, a guide to being human, Burkett focuses on areas of pain and anxiety as they tend to manifest for modern people: feelings of unworthiness, and issues surrounding sex, money, failure, and even death. Providing wisdom from Zen (channeled through his many experiences as a psychotherapist) and using language and metaphors from popular culture, he takes anxiety and teaches us to turn those fears into the building blocks of a fulfilling life.

A lively and provocative look at the modern culture of motherhood and at the social, economic, and political forces that shaped current ideas about parenting What is wrong with this picture? That's the question Judith Warner asks in this national bestseller after taking a good, hard look at the world of modern parenting--at anxious women at work and at home and in bed with unhappy husbands. When Warner had her first child, she was living in Paris, where parents routinely left their children home, with state-subsidized nannies, to join friends in the evening for dinner or to go on dates with their husbands. When she returned to the States, she was stunned by the cultural differences she found toward how people think about effective parenting--in particular, assumptions about motherhood. None of the mothers she met seemed happy; instead, they worried about the possibility of not having the perfect child, panicking as each developmental benchmark approached. Combining close readings of mainstream magazines, TV shows, and pop culture with a thorough command of dominant ideas in recent psychological, social, and economic theory, Perfect Madness addresses our cultural assumptions, and examines the forces that have shaped them. Working in the tradition of classics like Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique and Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism, and with an awareness of a readership that turned recent hits like The Bitch in the House and Allison Pearson's I Don't Know How She Does It into bestsellers, Warner offers a context in which to understand parenting culture and the way we live, as well as ways of imagining alternatives--actual concrete changes--that might better our lives.

Destined to become a classic in the tradition of "The Road Less Traveled" and "Care of the Soul", this book provides new insight into the most fundamental problem of human life--anxiety.

A Guidebook for Parents Navigating the New Teen Years Learn about the “New Teen” and how to adjust your parenting approach. Kids are growing up with nearly unlimited access to social media and the internet, and unprecedented academic, social, and familial stressors. Starting as early as eight years old, children are exposed to information, thought, and emotion that they are developmentally unprepared to process. As a result, saving the typical “teen parenting” strategies for thirteen-year-olds is now years too late. Urgent advice for parents of teens. Dr. John Duffy’s parenting book is a new and necessary guide that addresses this hidden phenomenon of the changing teenage brain. Dr. Duffy, a nationally recognized expert in parenting for nearly twenty-five years, offers this book as a guide for parents raising children who are growing up quickly and dealing with unresolved adolescent issues that can lead to anxiety and depression. Unprecedented psychological suffering among our young and why it is occurring. A shift has taken place in how and when children develop. Because of the exposure they face, kids are emotionally overwhelmed at a young age, often continuing to search for a sense of self well into their twenties. Paradoxically, Dr. Duffy recognizes the good that comes with these challenges, such as the sense of justice instilled in teenagers starting at a young age. Readers of this book will: • Sort through the overwhelming circumstances of today’s teens and better understand the changing landscape of adolescence • Come away with a revised, conscious parenting plan more suited to addressing the current needs of the New Teen • Discover the joy in parenting again by reclaiming the role of your teen’s ally, guide, and consultant If you enjoyed parenting books such as The Yes Brain, How to Raise an Adult, The Deepest Well, and The Conscious Parent; then Parenting the New Teen in the Age of Anxiety should be next on your list!

Presents ways for young children with anxiety to recognize when they are losing control and constructive ways to deal with it.

‘What does it mean when someone says they have Anxiety?’ ‘I’m stressed and nervous all the time, do I have Anxiety?’ ‘Will I ever get better?’ These are some of the questions we want to answer in this book. Is this the Age of Anxiety? Well, how could it not be – when so many millions of us feel that persistent combination of heart palpitations, impending doom, dread, even lack of control, as one of our contributors describes it. The question is, what can we do about it? Through this book we will learn how to distinguish between anxiety as 'an attack of the nerves' or something that will come and go, and Anxiety as a disorder, which will need treatment, including possibly therapy or medication. The conversations are even more pertinent given the global Covid-19 pandemic, prolonged periods of social isolation and an increased focus on mental health and wellness. We learn from coping with Anxiety Disorders, sharing their journey to healing, explaining exactly what would have helped them along the way, as they seek to bust common myths and misconceptions.

An acclaimed philosopher shows us how—in an age of unprecedented anxiety—we can find fulfillment by embracing the present and living more fully in the now. He is "the perfect guide for a course correction in life" (from the Introduction by Deepak Chopra). The brain can only assume its proper behavior when consciousness is doing what it is designed for: not writhing and whirling to get out of present experience, but being effortlessly aware of it. Alan Watts draws on the wisdom of Eastern philosophy and religion in this timeless and classic guide to living a more fulfilling life. His central insight is more relevant now than ever: when we spend all of our time worrying about the future and lamenting the past, we are unable to enjoy the present moment—the only one we are actually able to inhabit. Watts offers the liberating message that true certitude and security come only from understanding that impermanence and insecurity are the essence of our existence. He highlights the futility of endlessly chasing moving goalposts, whether they consist of financial success, stability, or escape from pain, and shows that it is only by acknowledging what we do not know that we can learn anything truly worth knowing. In The Wisdom of Insecurity, Watts explains complex concepts in beautifully simple terms, making this the kind of book you can return to again and again for comfort and insight in challenging times. “Perhaps the foremost interpreter of Eastern disciplines for the contemporary West, Watts had the rare gift of ‘writing beautifully the unwritable.’” —Los Angeles Times

Artists and writers examine the bombardment of information, misinformation, emotion, deception, and secrecy in online and offline life in the post-digital age. Every day we are bombarded by information, misinformation, emotion, deception, and secrecy in our online and offline lives. How does the never-ending flow of data affect our powers of perception and decision making? This richly illustrated and boldly designed collection of essays and artworks investigates visual culture in the post-digital age. The essays, by such leading cultural thinkers as Douglas Coupland and W. J. T. Mitchell, consider topics that range from the future of money to the role of art in a post-COVID-19 world; from mental health in the digital age to online grieving; and from the mediation of visual culture to the thickening of the digital sphere. Accompanying an ambitious exhibition conceived by the Sharjah Art Foundation and volume editor and curator Omar Kholeif, the book is a work of art and a labor of love, emulating the labyrinthine corridors of the exhibition itself. Created by a group of writers, artists, designers, photographers, and publishers, Art in the Age of Anxiety calls upon us to consider what our collective future will be and how humanity will adapt to it.