Global Anxiety

What are we afraid of? Things in our immediate environment, like a spiders and snakes? Other people, crowds, open spaces? Or are we more fearful of distant threats, over which we have no control? Floods, fires, random violence? What about threats from beyond our own borders?

We worry about things like the threat of terrorist attack, natural disasters and traffic accidents, says Beverley Raphael, professor of Population Mental Health and Disasters and Director of the Centre for Disasters and Terrorism at the University of Western Sydney.

We also fear direct threats to our safety and welfare – home invasion, being attacked, and having our children abducted.

Fear of these possible disasters is an important survival tool. It allows us to avoid them and deal with them if they do occur.

But Raphael believes we are becoming more fearful unnecessarily, thanks to the media which, she believes, is overexposing us to disasters, violence and other threats.

“Moving images, photos and stories of disasters make good copy,” she points out.

“The media can show us a disaster or threat in detail and in close up, straight into our living rooms. We see it instantly.”

Global fears

We’re also increasingly uneasy about the state of the planet, according to researchers from the US-based Pew Global Attitudes Project, a series of worldwide public opinion surveys about how the planet is faring, published in June 2007.

Their research, based on 100,000 interviews in 47 countries, identifies our fears as:

• Environmental degradation. There's been a big jump in concern about climate change and pollution and its effects. Globally, we blame the big polluters US and China.
• The threat of nuclear weapons. This isn’t as great a fear as it was in the Cold War era, but it still worries the Americans, the Japanese and Israel. There are fears of some 'rogue' nations acquiring a nuclear arsenal – in the Middle East, and Iran especially.
• Religious and ethnic hatred (often within our own communities following immigration).
• AIDS, avian influenza and other infectious diseases.
• The growing gap between rich and poor.

These problems seem intractable; scientists and other experts warn us of their dire consequences, but don’t seem to be able to come up with instant solutions to them – which only heightens our fears.

Government part of the problem?

Governments have an important role to play in how we perceive a threat. If we see that they're aware of the threats and have measures in place to deal with them, it diminishes our fear, says Raphael.

According to the Pew Global Attitudes Project, citizens look primarily to their governments and to international organisations such as the UN for solutions to global stresses like climate change and nuclear proliferation.

But they also report widespread dissatisfaction with governments' responses to these crises.

Rather than being part of the solution, too often governments can actually add to our fears, according to Robert Higgs, a political economist and writer with US think tank, The Independent Institute.

He says the governments actively use fear as a way of manipulating and cajoling its citizens for political purposes. In an essay entitled ‘Fear: the Foundation of Every Government’s Power’, published on The Independent Institute’s website, he writes:

“Over the ages, governments refined their appeals to popular fears, fostering an ideology that emphasises the people’s vulnerability to a variety of internal and external dangers from which the governors – of all people! – are said to be their protectors. Government, it is claimed, protects the populace from external attackers and from internal disorder, both of which are portrayed as ever-present threats.”

The threats vary from external threats, like the ‘danger’ of invasions of refugees, to internal threats from people with ethnic differences, or minorities who threaten our 'way of life’.

Or they can be threats of increasing terrorism, violence, and crime and drug use in the community, needing a ‘tough’ response - more police and more restrictive legislation over citizens.

Governments are aided in all of this by a populist media who rely on these fears to sell newspapers and television advertising.

The more things change

So with the authorities unable to sooth our fears, and the media hyping them for all they’re worth, are we collectively ready for tranquillisers? Are we living in an epidemic of fear? Will the 21st century be remembered as the anxious age?

One who doesn't believe that it will be is Gavin Andrews, professor of psychiatry at the University of New South Wales.

“It’s possible for the media to spread anxiety, as we saw in the reaction of people to the Orson Welles 1938 radio broadcast 'The War of the Worlds’,” he says, which led to tens of thousands of people fleeing their homes, believing Martians had invaded the US.

Andrews says during the Cuban Missile Crisis, at the height of the Cold War in 1962, people reported feeling anxious and fearful.

But by and large there are always threats in the background and the 21st century is no different from the 20th. In the last half of the last century it was the bomb, and before that the threat of Hitler, he says.

Fear levels may go up and down in response to certain events, but overall, levels are fear don’t change over time, he argues.

“Most fears are individual fears rather than group fears,” he says.

Andrews says how a person reacts to a fearful event depends on their personality, and there's a great deal of difference from person to person. It's more likely that someone will react fearfully if they suffer anxiety generally, he says. Someone may say they worry about global warming but they will probably worry about a range of other things as well, he says.

He doesn't believe fears triggered by global events are enough to actually cause a clinical anxiety disorder.

In fact, fear is easier to deal with if it's a collective fear, he argues. Being part of a group actually gives us an opportunity to share the fear and diminish it. For example, in London during the Blitz morale was surprisingly high.

Most fears are individual and transitory, and disappear once the threat diminishes, he says.

He argues fear can actually be a good thing because it enables people to react to and deal with the threat.

“When people are faced with a threat, they show adaptive behavioural reposes to deal with the threat – avoid it, or confront it, and deal with it so it’s no longer a threat,” he says.

On a global scale, it's a way of mobilising a population to pressure governments to act.

But we might take some collateral damage along the way, argues Beverley Raphael. The risk is that we withdraw, and become so risk-averse, we restrict our own lives, she says. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, for example, people in New York became withdrawn and wouldn’t travel. Their use of alcohol and drugs increased.

So what do we do if we're worried about global warming, nuclear proliferation, bird flu, and so on?

The answer is to take as much control over the situation as we can, Raphael says. We get information about the true nature of the threat (often its not as bad as we'd imagined), we draw on our strengths, we think positively, and we pressure and lobby governments and other institutions to tackle the problem.