In this month's Wired magazine, author Ethan Watters asks: "What will we call our new, collective, global economic anxiety?"
Watters suggests that the frontrunner is "posttraumatic embitterment disorder," first noticed among East Germans following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Pervasive insecurity took hold once the society they had become accustomed to all but disappeared.
Right now in the United States, many are unified by a symptom pool which includes anxiety, depression, and stress responses including insomnia or panic attacks. When I read Watters' article in Wired, I looked back to one of the articles he references, "Recession Anxiety Seeps Into Everyday Lives," published in the New York Times back in April. Yes, things are better now than they were in April. For some. Anecdotally, I know friends and family members who have lost jobs and are now employed, but I also know others who are waiting, filled with anxiety, to be called in to be let go. The anxiety that reporter Pam Belluck documented in April just looks different now, it's not altogether gone.
