Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

by John Green

When I was initially diagnosed with an anxiety disorder in the late 1980s, the first SSRI medications were very new. Pathological anxiety was not seen primarily—at least among my peers and caregivers—as a biomedical phenomenon, but instead as an overdeveloped personality trait. It was as likely to be healed by faith as by science. (In fact, I found great relief from my anxiety through religion and ritual.) Today, in my community, anxiety is more likely to be imagined as an illness to be treated through the healthcare system. I would argue this shift happened largely because the healthcare system got better at treating anxiety—not only with pharmaceutical interventions (although those have been very effective for many, including me) but also with stronger evidence-based therapy practices like exposure and response prevention therapy for obsessive-compulsive disorder or cognitive behavioral therapy for general anxiety disorder. And so we must remember that illness is not only a biomedical phenomenon, but also a constructed one, and how we imagine leprosy or OCD or tuberculosis matters. In a place where the formal healthcare system is not particularly effective at treating an illness, it is easy to imagine how more trusted spaces and people—like churches and faith healers—can be a better bet than doctors and hospitals.