Anxious Geographies offers a unique perspective on social anxiety, framing it as both a social and spatial phenomenon. Through a meticulous exploration using online questionnaires and interviews, the book provides a crucial examination of the intricacies of anxious lives.
This book presents a critical intervention in the experience of mental health in 21st-century society and provides a compelling geographical account of the underpinnings of the anxious experience. The book pivots on the in-depth perspectives of people with social anxiety, diagnosed or “sub-clinical”, but with an academic commentary that relates their experience to the medicalisation of a disrupted relational life, offering lessons for all of us in modern societies. Each chapter considers a unique aspect of social anxiety accounting for the social, spatial, temporal, relational and embodied dynamics, a geographical approach that enriches our understanding of the contexts and conditions that exacerbate and sustain anxious distress. The phenomenological descriptions herein, capture how social anxiety can profoundly alter a person’s coherent, habitual and embodied sense of being in and navigating through their social and spatial worlds. Through the experiential accounts of anxious distress and by considering the social contexts in which they emerge, this book provides readers with crucial insights into the hidden lives of those living with social anxiety.
This book will be of appeal to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of human geography and across the social sciences and humanities. It will also provide useful insights for academics and health professionals in social psychiatry, social psychology, counselling studies and therapeutic practice.
Chapter 1 Introduction
Introduction
Motivation and aims
A note on terminology
Researching social anxiety
Structure of this book
Chapter 2 The medicalisation of anxious distress
Introduction
A ‘neglected disorder’
Social underpinnings of social anxiety
Concluding remarks
Chapter 3: Situating social anxiety
Introduction
Geographies of health and wellbeing
Spatialities
Temporalities
Restrictive and disruptive temporalities
Layered temporalities
Embodiments
Embodied meaning
Embodied practices
Chapter 4: Temporal intensities: ruminations and anticipations
Introduction
Retroactivity
Anticipations
Ruminations
Concluding remarks
Chapter 5: Making sense of anxious experiences: self-diagnosis, diagnosis, and help-seeking
Introduction
Diagnosing the self
Barriers to diagnosis and support
Seeking formal diagnosis
Affirmative experiences of diagnosis
Negative encounters
Medical and therapeutic spaces
Concluding remarks
Chapter 6: Spatialities of anxious experience I: Home and workplaces
Introduction
Fragmented home spaces
Domestic routines
Anticipatory objects
Housing conditions
Workspaces
Concluding remarks
Chapter 7: Spatialities of social anxiety II: Diminishing social worlds
Introduction
Friendships and family relations
Difficulty and uncertainty
Fewer opportunities
Emotional work
Loneliness and social isolation
Third places
Consumer spaces
Public transport
Concluding remarks
Chapter 8: The (un)habitual geographies of social anxiety
Introduction
Habit
The disruption of everyday life
(Un)habitual geographies of social anxiety
Managing time and space
Spatial routes
Spatial screens
Moments of escape
Concluding remarks
Acknowledgment
Chapter 9: Towards anxious geographies
Reimagining social anxiety
Anxious spatialities
Anxious temporalities
Anxious embodiments
Avenues for future research
Recommendations for policy and practice
Unsung impacts
Biography
Louise E. Boyle is an honorary research fellow in the School of Geographical and Earth Sciences at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. She has published in Social Science and Medicine and co-edited the forthcoming Routledge Handbook on Spaces of Mental Health and Well-Being (2024).
