Anxious Geographies Worlds of Social Anxiety Geographies of Health Series

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

Concluding remarks

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

Home

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

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).