Maggie's Farm

There are more-or-less three sorts of non-major-mental-illness-related anxieties.

One is anxiety about worrisome real situations, one is anxiety related to real guilt, one is neurotic anxiety. Some would place the anxieties of minor emotional problems, eg phobias, OCD, GAD, etc., among the neurotic category, and some would place them in another (non-major) Mental Disorder category.

Thus anxiety (fearfulness) is mainly a symptom of something, and usually not a "disease" in and of itself. Frequently, we find that what people think they are anxious about is not what they think it is.

Regardless of category, we indeed do have pills to put a band-aid on all of these sorts of anxieties.

From a piece about Kierkegaard, The Danish Doctor of Dread:

In his “Works of Love,” Kierkegaard remarks that all talk about the spirit has to be metaphorical. Sometimes anxiety is cast as a teacher, and at others, a form of surgery. The prescription in “The Concept of Anxiety” and other texts is that if we can, as the Buddhists say, “stay with the feeling” of anxiety, it will spirit away our finite concerns and educate us as to who we really are, “Then the assaults of anxiety, even though they be terrifying, will not be such that he flees from them.” According to Kierkegaard’s analysis, anxiety like nothing else brings home the lesson that I cannot look to others, to the crowd, when I want to measure my progress in becoming a full human being.

But this, of course, is not the counsel you are likely to hear these days at the mental health clinic.

Curing the uneasy soul is not so easy. When it's coming from real guilt, it's not even desirable to cure it. The guilty must suffer to learn, just like school. Good shrinks are not about feel-good, we are about dealing with reality. Reality often does not feel good.