Guide to ‘Neurotica’ charts new age of anxiety

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Remember the time when people made stupid mistakes instead of “bad choices,” when anal-retentive personalities were simply tidy and no one needed a “life coach?”

Gone are the days when “closure” was a term used for zippers and when “denial” was only a river in Egypt.

Welcome to the new Age of Anxiety where Western culture is beset by so much dread that “bad habits have been turned into diseases, foibles are afflictions and sins are syndromes,” says writer Jon Winokur.

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Direct from California—the state that in 1986 created a task-force to promote self esteem—comes Winokur’s “Encyclopedia Neurotica,” an irreverent guide to the world of neuroses, phobias and a slew of other conditions just waiting to be chronicled in the next best-selling “addiction memoir.”

By some estimates, one in five Americans suffers from at least one phobia and new ones, like heterophobia or “the fear of straight people,” are being identified all the time.

U.S. therapists have reported a significant increase in patients, especially men, since the 1999 debut of “The Sopranos”—the TV show about a Mafia boss with angst.

Winokur makes a clear distinction in the book between neurosis in the colloquial sense and psychosis that leads to criminal behavior or demands hospitalization and is no laughing matter.

His “issues” are mostly with the “psychobabble” that has turned juvenile delinquents into kids suffering from “conduct disorder” and gluttons into “compulsive over-eaters.”

His often acerbic dictionary-style guide is an indictment of the self absorption of the affluent West, and the growing tendency to categorize rather than celebrate eccentricity.

“In this country, we just have so much of everything and so much time to analyze ourselves.

“We seem to medicalize oddity and quirkiness. I also wanted to try to make the point that, as actress Carrie Fisher said, ‘All the good people are nuts.’ This is what makes life so interesting,” Winokur told AMN Health.

FROM CYBERCHONDRIA TO TELEPHILIA

In a nation where lawsuits alleging emotional distress are commonplace, Winokur believes that victim mentality has almost become a status symbol and that many Americans no longer feel responsible for their actions.

Winokur, naturally, has “never, ever” consulted a shrink himself. “I see therapy as a substitute for friendship. I see it as a commentary on the impersonality of society that people have to pay someone to tell them their troubles,” he said.

His book quotes Pulitzer Prize journalist Michael Skube, who in 1998 noted: “Of all the countries on earth, we are the leaders in disorders...If we don’t have attention deficit disorder, we have...anxiety disorder, or mood disorder. Other cultures just don’t seem to have the problems we do.”

Reality television addicts may be suffering from telephilia, a term coined in 2003 by New York Times critic Frank Rich to describe the “pathological longing of Americans, no matter how talentless, to be on television.”

Cyberchondria is “hypochondria resulting from seeing one’s symptoms on a medical Web site.”

Anglolalia—“the uncontrollabe urge to affect a British accent, most often afflicting celebrities”—appears to be on the increase while arachibutyrophobia—“the fear of peanut butter getting stuck to the roof of your mouth”—is so outlandish it might possibly be true.

Some old disorders have gone distinctly out of fashion, says Winokur, notably nymphomania, once used to describe excessive female lust and now “a term rendered obsolete by the sexual revolution.”

But denial is particularly pernicious, since if you don’t know you’re in it, how can you get out of it?

Or as comic George Carlin once quipped, “In Los Angeles, there’s a hotline for people in denial. So far no-one has called.”

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