Death Grip Read Online Free PDF Page B

requiring aggressive pharmaceutical intervention. More than 1.5 million Americans are on disability due to anxiety, depression, or bipolar illness, 5 a 2.5-fold increase between 1987 and 2007. 6 Six million adults are now considered bipolar, 7 with a forty-fold increase in the diagnosis of children and adolescents with bipolar disorder between 1995 and 2003. 8 Between 1996 and 2005, the number of Americans taking an antidepressant more than doubled, from 13 million to 27 million (10 percent of us over the age of six are now on antidepressants), 9 with global sales of antidepressants equaling $19 billion a year. 10 A 2006 estimate cited a whopping 8.6 million Americans who take sleep medication. 11 The atypical antipsychotics Zyprexa, Seroquel, and Risperdal have surpassed cholesterol drugs to become America’s top-selling class of pharmaceuticals. 12 And benzodiazepine sales are on the rise, climbing from 69 million prescriptions in 2002 to 83 million in 2007. 13 In total, one in every eight Americans is regularly popping psychotropic pills, with total sales of these drugs in the tens of billions: $40-plus billion in 2008 alone. 14 If you look at it one way, we’ve all gotten crazier, driven mad by the exigencies of modern life. But if you look at it another, it’s that the psychiatry has swollen like a bloodsucking tick, infiltrating the darkest corners of the human soul with empty promises and dangerous nostrums that are only making us sicker.
    In my experience, it’s the latter.
    You see, I’m whispering from outside the concertina wire, but soon it will be a scream. I crab-crawled through the spools one moonless night while the guards dipped their heads for a smoke, one of the few to slip away. I drew on my strength as a climber—my firsthand experiences with fear and mortal peril—to do so. From what I see peering back, too many prisoners yet languish. We should free them. We should bring them back into the world, back into the daylight. We should show them that this insanity need not continue.

 
    CHAPTER 2
    Before we go too far, I need to point out the difference between fear and anxiety, because this book deals with both and because they’re not quite the same. Fear is our gut, animal reaction to a perilous situation—it’s a physical response. Anxiety , meanwhile, is psychological: It’s nameless dread, a mentally concocted fear state. The psychologist Paul Foxman’s treatise on anxiety, Dancing with Fear, better explains the distinction: “Fear is the instinctive reaction to danger. Anxiety is a learned, irrational reaction to fear—a fear of fear.” 1 If a mugger holds a gun to your face and demands your wallet, that’s fear; if you wake up in a cold sweat for the month afterward, flashing back to the robbery and feeling helpless, your hands shaking and your heart slamming, that’s anxiety. Anxiety can wear many guises, both physical and mental. My 2,600-page Webster’s Third New International Dictionary defines anxiety as “a state of being anxious or of experiencing a strong or dominating blend of uncertainty, agitation or dread, and brooding fear about some contingency.” 2 Part two of the definition gets at the physical manifestations: “an abnormal and overwhelming sense of apprehension or fear often marked by such physical symptoms as tension, tremor, sweating, palpitation, and increased pulse rate.” 3
    Climbing exposes you to both fear and anxiety, often in spades. This much I learned early on. When I was sixteen, my father and I and his college roommate, Bob, who introduced me to climbing, along with Bob’s girlfriend, Marion, climbed the enormous glaciated volcano Mount Rainier, at 14,410 feet Washington State’s highest point. The mountain is a singular heap, a mammoth castle of ice visible for hundreds of miles, floating in the sky like a hallucination. An ascent via the standard Disappointment Cleaver