I'm terrified of rabies, my Gen Z daughter fears climate change. Why anxiety is generational

Yahoo

4 days ago

Last month, I was convinced I had rabies. I didn't have any symptoms, or I'd hardly be sitting here writing this, but I was getting occasional intrusive flashes of panic that I was incubating the dread, 100-per cent-fatal virus that can first show symptoms months after exposure.
My partner and I had been on holiday in Vietnam a few weeks before. As we were leaving a guesthouse in Ninh Binh, a friendly pet puppy skittered up behind me and lightly nipped my leg through my trousers. Now, there is rabies in Vietnam – 82 people died of it in 2023 – and you don't only get it from street dogs; it lurks even in puppies who seem playful.
I weighed the evidence. I hadn't been vaccinated against rabies; most tourists don't bother because the jabs are expensive, and there is a 'post exposure' option if you do interact with a rabid animal. But because the skin on my leg hadn't been broken, I decided I was almost certainly going to be okay, carried on with my holiday, and basically forgot about it.
Then, a few weeks after our return, the news was full of the terrible story of Yvonne Ford, a 59-year-old woman from Barnsley, who had died from rabies after being scratched by a puppy while on holiday in Morocco in February. Only scratched! Ford had started experiencing symptoms just two weeks prior to her death on June 11.
Upon reading this, I started to worry – albeit in a controlled way. Should I get the 'post infection' set of jabs which would save me from certain death if I had been exposed? Was it worth the not insignificant £500 this would cost? Or should I just live with the very tiny risk?
To add to my squirming brain, around this time there was a hostile incident between India and Pakistan, which the media always helpfully refer to as 'nuclear powers.'
This brought back my teenage fear of nuclear war, of dying slowly of radiation sickness, as fed by such terrifying 1980s fare as the films Threads and The Day After. It really was Apocalypse Bingo for a while there, earlier this summer.
I talked to my daughter, Annabel, 22, about what she made of my paranoias, and we started to explore the subject more deeply. I shared my Generation X fears: nuclear war, Aids – back in the day, at least – and rabies. (Who could forget those scary public information campaigns and screaming, red La Rage posters on cross-channel ferries?)
Annabel, who is firmly Generation Z, told me she was worried about her economic future, 'brain aneurysms and freak deaths – I think this definitely comes from reading too much health journalism,' but most of all, climate change.
'Fears about climate change do occasionally keep me up at night,' she said. 'The heatwaves have been making me worried about the coming decades. It is clearly already happening. I think due to modern life we all forget how reliant we are upon the environment. Although the anxiety maybe isn't productive, I do think we should all be more concerned about climate change.'
Why anxiety sticks with us
I asked Owen O'Kane, a psychotherapist and the author of the bestselling book Addicted to Anxiety, what he made of all this. To a certain extent, the 'flavour' of our fears is due to what was making headlines at a formative period in our lives, he believes.
'Fashions change and we go through phases, your experience as an early adult stays with you,' he says. 'News headlines certainly don't help. The people who write them go for the worst-case scenario, the most catastrophic outcome. If you are anxious by nature, your 'anxious self' will gravitate towards these headlines.'
If you tend towards anxiety, these more dramatic incidents are likely to affect you compared with an individual who is more sanguine.
'Anxious people are responsible people and they care deeply about things,' says O'Kane. 'They have a healthy altruistic core.'
The problem, however, is that there's a risk anxiety can affect your life in a negative way.
'Your anxiety is like a watch guard, looking for a potential threat, and you might suddenly fixate on this threat,' says O'Kane.
'For example, a teenager might see a photo of a field of fire, and start worrying about climate change after a period of not thinking about it.'
At heart, says O'Kane, anxiety is all about how much a person can tolerate the uncertainty of everyday life.
'To be worried is useful and has a function, to some degree,' he says. 'But it becomes a problem if we become obsessive, or avoid going out, for example. Every person has to do a cost-benefit analysis – where the price is not leading your life, and you become 'addicted' to your anxiety.'
These days, says O'Kane, many people are 'frightened of our own shadow.
'The presentation and triggers are different, but these existential fears are actually our psyche asking fundamental questions: 'Will I get ill?', 'Will I die?', 'Will anyone help me?' 'Will I cope?''
And for our children's generation, the triggers are everywhere. 'People who are now in midlife didn't have social media,' says O'Kane.
'There was less exposure to world events. Yes, we knew there were wars and starvation and plane crashes; we were not unaware of these. But young people have a more elevated awareness of what's going on globally. It's not surprising that there are heightened levels of anxiety in Generation Z.'
How social media fuels modern fears
Annabel agrees with this analysis. 'Most of my fears are because of the news and social media, which allow little nuggets of anxiety to interrupt your day,' she says.
'Your phone pops up and it's another thing to be worried about, because that's what we engage with.'
O'Kane suggests that anxieties can fluctuate, both in a negative way – in that they become harmful phobias – but also in a positive way, in that you can learn to manage and overcome them. I certainly concur with this: my teens and 20s were a mass of health anxieties, usually involving dread neurological diseases, all without a logical explanation. As I grew up, I learnt to keep a lid on these worries and defuse them.
So, how did I resolve my rabies scare?
First of all, I looked up the statistics of how many people had died of rabies in the UK after a foreign trip: six people between 2000 and 2024.
I spoke to my sister-in-law, a GP, who reiterated my chance of contracting the virus was infinitesimal. I then texted the guesthouse in Vietnam, who told me the puppy had been vaccinated against rabies and was healthy. (I have to assume they were telling the truth.) As I received this reply, I was looking at my phone while crossing a road and almost got hit by a car.
When I related the above to O'Kane, I was thrilled to have passed his 'healthy response' test.
'The situation was that you were bitten by a dog and there was rabies in the area,' he says. 'It's not dissimilar to how people felt during Covid. I wouldn't describe this as an irrational fear, but a 'situational one'.
'The context of your worry was normal and your parameters went up, you identified the trigger,' he says. 'Someone less prone to worry than you would have made the decision this was low risk and not worried at all afterwards. But you did the healthy thing for you – looked at the broader evidence, weighed it up, and let it go. You were able to acknowledge you could tolerate the worry. Someone more prone to worry would have been googling furiously, or have gone for the vaccinations.'
O'Kane is at pains to point out that not all anxieties should be dismissed. 'I'm not saying you should tolerate all uncertainty, and there are useful, functional worries,' he says. 'For example, if you've had unsafe sex with someone you know is HIV positive, you should take the sensible medical approach and seek treatment.'
And in less critical situations, we can lower our exposure to worrying material. 'I've gone off social media, and I'm feeling a bit better about everything,' says Annabel.
'It was overwhelming though, because there's so much online encouragement to optimise and do better – very Gen Z.'
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