Lindsay Abrams, THE ATLANTIC, August 1, 2012
Overlooking socioeconomic conditions and jumping to a psychiatric diagnosis can prevent us from addressing the real issues behind anxiety.
The list of practical and existential worries that keep mothers up at night runs long. They worry about their children getting hurt or killed in an accident. They worry that their children will not be happy and, on a lesser scale, that they will not be socially and academically successful. They worry, I’m sure, that they stay healthy, that they do the right thing as tricky situations arise, and their children be, overall, good people. They are often more worried about many of these things than their own children are.
For poor mothers, the usual worries are necessarily compounded by life’s more immediate realities. Following the families of almost 5,000 children in the earliest years of their lives, the 2011 Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study identified poverty not by household income, but as a manifestation of telling life events. Those included telephone service being disconnected, not being able to pay full rent or mortgage, not being able to pay utility bills, accepting free food, or having to move in with other people due to financial reasons.
When poverty is looked at as a series of problems that must continuously be solved, the worry, one would presume, is continuous. It may very well be extreme, and disruptive. It might even go so far, the data suggests, as to be pathological.