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Worrying: A Literary and Cultural History. By Francis O’Gorman. Bloomsbury; 173 pages.

When he is not teaching Victorian literature at the University of Leeds or writing books, Francis O’Gorman admits to doing a lot of unnecessary brooding. “Worrying: A Literary and Cultural History” is his affectionate tribute to low level fretting – what the author calls “the hidden histories of ordinary pain” – in everyone’s life. Humanity’s sense of anxiety has deep roots. Contemporary angst is inextricably tied up with living in an advanced, hypermodern society, and yet, when worrying takes hold, it often does so in ways that appear altogether premodern, even pre Enlightenment.

If there is a message in the book, it addresses the ever expanding cottage industry around happiness and well being. The latest edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder, DSM 5”, has broadened psychiatry’s reach into everyday life, medicalising and stigmatising an ever greater number of quirks and foibles. Against this backdrop, Mr O’Gorman’s celebration of the wonderful eccentricity of human nature is both refreshing and necessary.

He believes that “being a modern worrier is just…the moth eaten sign of being human” and playfully suggests that people should refine Descartes’s famous dictum to: “I worry, therefore I am.”

The Economist, August 1st 7th 2015. Adaptado.

Levando-se em conta que o texto é parte de uma resenha de um livro, responda, em português, às seguintes perguntas:

a) Qual é o objetivo do autor do livro?
b) De que forma o propósito do livro de O’Gorman se opõe ao que é proposto pela Associação Americana de Psiquiatria?
c) Qual é a sugestão do autor do livro para modificar a famosa frase de René Descartes “Penso, logo existo”?