Scott Stossel
Scott Stossel
Scott Hanford Stossel is an American journalist and editor. He is the editor of The Atlantic magazine, and previously served as executive editor of The American Prospect magazine. He is a graduate of Harvard University. He is the son of Anne Hanford and Dr. Thomas P. Stossel, the brother of cartoonist Sage Stossel, and the nephew of TV journalist John Stossel. In 2014, Stossel was awarded the Erikson Institute Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth7 August 1969
CountryUnited States of America
Some people say that in stressful situations I can seem unflappable, and I think that's partly because I'm always kind of internally flapped.
Somehow, in many of those near-miss instances, I’ve managed to fight through and continue. But in all these situations, even when they’re apparently going well, I feel I am living on the razor’s edge between success and failure, adulation and humiliation—between justifying my existence and revealing my unworthiness to be alive,
It is an irony of medical history that even as Freud's later work would make him the progenitor of modern psychodynamic psychotherapy, which is generally premised on the idea that mental illness arises from unconscious psychological conflicts, his papers on cocaine make him one of the fathers of biological psychiatry, which is governed by the notion that mental distress is partly caused by a physical or chemical malfunction that can be treated with drugs.
To say that my anxiety is reducible to the ions in my amygdala”—the home of the fight-or-flight reflex—“is as limiting as saying that my personality or my soul is reducible to the molecules that make up my brain cells or to the genes that underwrote them,
To some people, I may seem calm. But if you could peer beneath the surface, you would see that I'm like a duck--paddling, paddling, paddling.
Generally speaking, the anxiety will pass, which is easy for me to say when I'm not in the middle of an anxiety attack. When you're in the throes of one, it's hard to feel anything other than utter misery and terror.
Anxiety has afflicted me all my life.