As recently as 35 years ago, anxiety did not exist as a diagnostic category. While anxiety is the most common form of officially classified mental illness today, it is still too often misunderstood.

How does anxiety differ from depression? What causes it? Do drugs work? Do they in some ways alter who we are?

In My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind, Stossel─the editor of The Atlantic─gives a frank account of his own struggles with anxiety and of the history of efforts by scientists, philosophers, and writers to understand the condition that is now estimated to affect 40 million adults in the U.S. (18% of the population).

Stossel vividly depicts anxiety’s human toll—its crippling impact, its devastating power to paralyze—while at the same time exploring the most recent scientific advances in neuroscience and molecular genetics and how those who suffer from anxiety find ways to manage and control it.

Stossel will be in conversation with Hanna Rosin, a senior editor at The Atlantic and a founder and editor at DoubleX. Book signing to follow.

Co-sponsored with the Anxiety and Depression Association of America