The age of anxiety is nothing new

So let's stop judging young girls who are struggling

Silently battling anxiety my senior year of college

Years before I got sober, a therapist told me I had generalized anxiety disorder. I was in college and worried often, mostly about hypothetical future scenarios that were largely out of my control. I lay awake at night worrying about the health of my loved ones, my career path, my weight. In the light of day, my lingering worries made it hard to concentrate on more pertinent tasks like picking a major, studying for exams, or cleaning my dorm room. Eventually, after over a year of therapy and struggling through my days, I was prescribed an SSRI used to treat depression and anxiety disorder. I was 21. 

That first year, submerged in shame, I didn’t tell a soul I had started taking medication. I made up excuses for where I was walking when I bumped into friends on my way to therapy, offering squirrely responses to lunch invites. I hid my pill bottle from my boyfriend and roommates, stashing it in my sock drawer like contraband. No one talked about going to therapy, and I felt like a social recluse for needing help with my mental health. Still, while I initially worried about feeling unlike myself on medication – a groggy, zombie-like bobblehead – taking the pills felt like coming up for air after years underwater. Slowly, I began to return to equilibrium. 

As the cultural conversation around mental health shifted over the next few years, I grew increasingly comfortable discussing my anxiety. As the stigma around mental health faded, so did our collective shame. By the time I ultimately got sober at 28, citing lessened anxiety as a reason for not drinking felt socially acceptable. Celebrities began to speak publicly about their anxiety and mental health, and a younger generation developed a vocabulary mine lacked, equipped with the understanding that it’s okay not to be okay. 

Given all of the progress we’ve made in the last decade, I was bothered by this opinion piece in The New York Times last week. In her essay, “Anxiety in the Age Of Barbie,” Maureen Dowd cites a summer of girl power with Barbie, Taylor Swift, and Beyoncé leading the charge. Which is why she has been feeling “sad,” when talking to friends with college-aged daughters, to learn about high rates of anxiety and campuses “awash in SSRIs.” 

“These young women seem to have everything, yet they are unable to fully enjoy a stretch in their life that should be sizzling with adventure and promise,” she writes.

This overly simplified take on anxiety in young adults made me cringe. Sizzling with adventure and promise can be overwhelming; living away from home for the first time and figuring out who you are and who you want to be can be terrifying. Many mental health disorders first rear their heads during college-aged years, and grappling with anxiety or depression doesn’t make a young person any less promising or capable. In fact, telling young women to just “enjoy” their lives in the face of a mental health crisis is deeply unhelpful and irresponsible. Gen-Z isn’t the first generation to struggle with anxiety; they’re just the first one who isn’t hiding it. 

Dowd goes on to quote a friend, the mother of a teenage daughter: “Back-to-school was always a time of excitement about where the future was headed — new notebooks, fresh supplies. But it feels like people are disappearing into sadness. Everybody’s looking for a shrink instead of a sharpened pencil.” 

I remember going to the bookstore at the start of every new semester with a heaviness in my chest and praying that, with the right set of highlighters and notebooks, this year would be different. By the time I came to terms with the fact that I needed a therapist, I had to wait six weeks for the first available appointment. Instead of shaking our heads at all the sad girls, we should be talking about improving and increasing access to mental health resources on college campuses. The coping mechanisms I eventually gained in therapy proved much more effective than wishing my sadness away with school supplies, but I was unable to absorb these tools without the help of medication. 

Society has diminished anxiety for years, from the postpartum kind to the generalized variety. Much like millennials grew up in a post-9/11 climate, this generation is coming of age in an era marked by social media, Covid isolation, political tension, and gun violence. Anxiety is an unpleasant reality, but it’s one we have to accept and learn to recognize responsibly.  

My anxiety didn’t magically disappear when I started taking medication. I continued seeing a therapist and eventually got sober, which allowed me to keep working through and understanding the root causes of my anxiety. Medication isn’t a solution for anxiety on its own, and I’m not suggesting we shell out pills to every young woman who is struggling and send her on her way. But when paired with other tools, anti-anxiety meds can be a helpful jumpstart for a healthier lifestyle. (Not unlike the way doctors are now describing the intended use case for Ozempic.) 

The age of anxiety may be ongoing, but it’s manageable with help. So let’s stop being dismissive and pretending otherwise.