When W.H. Auden wrote the poem The Age of Anxiety in 1947, he spoke of the human search for meaning and clarity in the increasingly industrialized and complicated world evolving in the wake of World War II. In the poem, Auden quips, “the world needs a wash and a week’s rest.” Many of us feel this way three-quarters of a century later as we daily witness violence, unrest, uncertainty, catastrophe, and vitriol in our society. We are traumatized by nonstop access to negative news stories, the replaying of violent images, and the hostile language and behavior that have seemingly become normalized and unchallenged in our society. It remains to be seen how we will ultimately view this time in our history from a psychological perspective but, anecdotally, I would argue that it has created a society-wide sense of unease, anxiety, and distress. Clients I work with express climate anxiety, election anxiety, news cycle burnout, and fear of violence. The long-term impact of living in this type of environment will surely have a serious psychological impact.

My practical “research” as a psychotherapist, drawn from my work with many adolescents and adults, indicates a few major concerns that affect many people at this moment in time:

Political anxiety. We are less than a week out from an attempted assassination on a former president. This........

© Psychology Today