Homo Anxiens
NATIONAL JOURNAL OF HOMOEOPATHY 1999 Jan / Feb VOL VIII NO 1.
Dr Manu Kothari
Dr Lopa Mehta
"The American public, known to the rest of the world as the originator of fads and fetishes, from time to time, suffer from a preoccupation over a single disease." The rest of the world sees in America the Big Scientific Brother who must be imitated. So all nations and all pathies have joined America being worried over a single malady that seems to be engulfing the whole of mankind. The Homo sapiens is fast shedding his sapientia to metamorphose mentally into the Homo Anxiens. The National Journal of Homoeopathy, in its avowed aim to keep abreast with the latest, is concerned not just over anxiety, but over Anxiety Disorders, making an average person yet more anxious over anxiousness.
The Oxford Companion to Medical Studies classifies Anxiety into good and bad: "Anxiety is an unpleasant mental state of foreboding, uneasiness, and apprehension, almost approaching fear, which may be accompanied by signs of sympathetic over activity such as tremor, sweating and tachycardia. When appropriate to the circumstances, such a state may be regarded as a physiological preparation for whatever ordeal or difficult task lies ahead. When inappropriate, excessive, or prolonged, it is a symptom of a mental disorder."
The Psychiatric Dictionary, also by Oxford, multiplies the bad problem 40 times, to list and define the following varieties: anal, automatic, basic, castration, conscious and unconscious, death, depersonalization, depressive, ego, elemental, erotized, examination, free-floating, hysteric, ictal, id, instinctual, neurosis, neurotic, object, objective, oral, organic, phobic, preparedness, pre-release, primal, psychogenic, reaction, real, resolution, separation, signal, simple, superego, true urethral and virginal. To give the classification a touch of Latin learnedness, it lists anxietas praesenilis and anxietas tibiarum. It comes, as an anticlimax to be told that anxietas tibiarum is "a nervous agitation, continually impelling the patient to change the position of his (or her) legs". One could safely generalize that at all religious discourses, scientific conferences, public meetings and lecture theatres, the most common and compelling illness is Anxietas Tibiarum, more pervasive and menacing than HIV or AIDS.
Having been frightened sufficiently by the lexical panorama of anxiety, we may delve into its derivation. Anger, angst, anguish, anxious, and anxiety are all rooted in anger, angst, meaning wrath, grief, oppress, choke, and "hot displeasure" thus being close to Sanskrit 'angar' meaning burning charcoal. To be anxious, to have anxiety, is to be angry within and/or without. In short, to be at quarrel with yourself, and/or with others, with the world, with your destiny and your gods. To have anxiety is to nurse the vanity that circumstances are under your control, and then to nurse the guilt that you are not doing what you ought to. In the ultimate, etymological, analysis, the sure anti-anxiety agent is a sense of humility, a yea saying to life, a conviction that whatever it is, is right. Anxiety is fear born out of faithlessness.
Before we set about discussing the causes of anxiety, it behoves us medicos to find out the how of anxiety that the medical profession itself generates. Medical science, over the ages, has been masking its glorious ignorance through "do this" and far more so "don't you do that." The result is a kill-joy existence bereft of spices, salt, sugar, spirit and spontaneity of sex. HIV-AIDS-PHOBIA-pampered, condomed coitus is neither sex nor love, but masqueraded masturbation, mono or mutual. At a check-up clinic, rightly defined as a place where a person walks in and a patient walks out, a mere squiggle of the mercury column or the ECG dis-eases you for good. Alex Comfort, the UK gerentologist-turned-sex-guru, wrote THE ANXIETY MAKERS: synonymizing the title with medicos out to medicalize much that is normal. Hence the common anomaly of the Well Baby Clinic. Why a clinic for a kid at peace with itself?
Anxiety, a form of depression, is now rated as a disorder that will overtake heart attacks as the major dis-ease and killer of mankind, as we march into the third millennium. Take heart from the fact that anxiety is as old as humankind. The word animal is rooted in anima=atma. When menen=mind=manas rides over an atma, a man is born. And what's mind if not a devil's workshop that is at war with whatever there is. No wonder, Kathopanisad, Gita, and Milton sing in a chorus to declare mind as the maker of hell or heaven, more so the former, as global experience has shown. Hence the invocation Gnothi Seauton (Greek), Nosce te ipsum (Latin), and Know thyself that make Dada Bhagwan write Beyond the Mind, as the panacea for all our anxiety. Swami Vivekananda felt that our education and our upbringing have paid scant attention to mind whereby so much of man-invited misery.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, 150 years ago, saw the beginnings of industrialization and lamented: "Things will ride the minds of men." Things, things and yet more things spell consumerism, that was long ago summed up by Veblen, the US socio-economist, as conspicuous consumption. All material wants can only be produced by denying somewhere, the production of the basic needs of food, water, and air. According to the Planning Commission's latest report: till 1985, 750 Indian villages had no access to drinking water within 1.6 km of its periphery. As of 1998, that number is a whopping 65,000, meaning that the Indian industrialization has dehydrated 10 villages every day for the past 13 years, a suicidal march that is more intense now. So in Mumbai, you have Mercedes and malaria, mobile and mosquitoes, MacDonald's and murder, concrete-jungle and confusion. The better side of the human mind has no scope left. The lesser side takes over and you call it Anxiety Disorders.
Man is lonely, and, hence depressed. The Red Indian Chief Sealth (Stealth) prophetically presaged this scenario, way back in 1855. "What is man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone, man would die from great loneliness of spirit, for whatever happens to the beasts, also happens to man. All things are connected."
Drugs-Homoeopathic, allopathic, and what-so-ever-pathic-cannot be a solution for a problem that begins with our mind and ends with it. While we are groping for the definition of mind itself, which allopathic anxiolytic can work? Martindale's Pharmacopoeia makes it quite clear that all tranquilizers, mood elevators, anxiolysers, and allied psychotropic drugs are at heart only barbiturates with a typical depressive action. Is it the Homoeopathic approach adopted by allopathy along the famed principle of Similia Similibus Curanter? And O'Hahnemann and his followers, pray, which miasma will you invoke to explain the tragedy of Homo anxiens?
Yet, with "all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams," it is a beautiful world, a delectable universe. Like that commendable book: Give Happiness a Chance you should give the milieu a chance to anxiolyse you. The colourful riots of sunrise and sunset, the silvery carpet of moonshine, the perennial sparkle of the stars, the cool of the breeze and the music of the rains, the aroma of wet earth, the sheer beauty and generosity of the plant life rightly called the Beautanical Kingdom. The cooing of birds, the wagging of a dog's tail, the gallop of a horse, the neighing of the cow, the warmth of human camaraderie and the mind-blowing experience of human intellect. Just stick to the Best plan: Breathe, Eat, Sleep, Think well and all the above and a lot more is yours for the asking and at no extra charge.
Remember:
You are the Problem. You Are the Very Solution.
Recall William Blake and strive to:
Behold the world in a grain of sand
And Heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
