MENTAL DISTRESS AND YOU: Understanding the new culture of ever-present suspicious watchfulness

By Jim Knipfel
New York Press
Apr. 25, 2006

Last week, the city Health Dept. released the shocking results of a new study. According to their research, a larger percentage of New Yorkers than ever before suffer frequent episodes of what they’re calling “mental distress.” Of course living in New York has always been stressful—the noise, the traffic, the flood of assholes, the jostling and shoving, the lines, the prices, the shrieking insane, the obliviousness, the crime. Still, the experts seem puzzled by the sudden jump in mental distress. With the dramatic drop in the crime rate and the new noise regulations, how could this be?

Well, you know, it might not be quite the pickle they think it is. Let me give them a little hint. Not a day has gone by in the past four and a half years that someone—politicians, cops, military officers, security experts, pundits in every form of media, people on the street or in the office—hasn’t reminded us that we’re going to be attacked again. Terrorists are going to blow up the subways and bridges, or crash more planes into more big buildings, or release a poison gas or drop a canister full of Ebola into the drinking water. And if it’s not terrorists messing things up, it’ll be a giant hurricane scooting up the Eastern seaboard to wash every living New Yorker out to sea. Or maybe it’ll be the bird flu, or a disaster at Indian Point.

One way or another, we are told every single goddamn day that at any given second we could die in some horrible, unexpected manner. Maybe I’m a fool, but it seems to me that this might just have a little bit to do with the increase in mental distress. The rest of it, I suppose, can be attributed to diet.