Welcome to the Gathering Pod, the audio version of my weekly gathering room broadcast.

I'm Martha Beck.

This episode is called The Light at the End of the Tunnel.

And the reason I say this is because I've been doing some research on fear.

I had to write a little article on mental

health and books and it got me started and I am now very, very into this topic and it's

a very topical topic and I will tell you for why. It is topical because anxiety disorders

are the top problem, the top mental health problem

for people around the world.

And this particular issue is mushrooming.

In 2019, at the start of 2019, about 10 million people in America, the United States, were diagnosed with anxiety disorders.

In 2020, and this may not surprise you, it was 40 million, up 400 percent, 40 million people

diagnosed with anxiety disorders. And that means, let me just tell you what it means.

It means you wake up in the morning with a sick dread in your soul and you don't even know why. And, you know,

you open the curtain and it's like, ah, the world is terrifying. And then you go into the bathroom and

the water is terrifying. Everything's terrifying. And it sounds like something you could just calm down from,

but that's why they call it a disorder. You really can't. You can't just bring it down because

your brain is stuck on scared. And I do think that the pandemic made it much, much worse.

But it's not just that. It's the fact that we're all getting so much information and news from so many sources.

It was all the rifts in our society that were made more obvious by the pandemic and the situation of just being in our houses.

And it's just continuing to go up. So when, was it

Harry Truman who said the only thing we have to fear, FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt said the only

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