Responding to the “western culture isn’t good at dealing with anxiety section”:
I think anxiety is a bit of a special case, and also that internal problems are hard to distinguish from external problems. Take for example lead-poisoning, which seems to have drastically increased violence and impulsiveness in places with leaded gasoline, and I am very skeptical that any internal intervention would have helped people affected by lead poisoning. Similarly we have antidepressants which have a pretty good track record of working for anxiety and depression.
Overall I would say that western culture has a stronger track record of finding scalable solutions to mental problems than any other culture, though competitive pressures certainly have also caused it to adopt a bunch of factors that are now causing people anxiety (though overall western cultures still appear to be the self-reported happiest cultures in the world, as well as the least anxious cultures in the world, based on quick googling).
There is maybe an argument to be made that what you truly mean by non-modernity is a hunter-gatherer society, but what lives those lives and what levels of anxiety they experiences strikes me as a much harder question.
Lifetime rates of clinical depression and anxiety in the West tend to be approximately 4 to 10 times greater than rates in Asia. In this review, we explore one possible reason for this cross-cultural difference...
Responding to the “western culture isn’t good at dealing with anxiety section”:
I think anxiety is a bit of a special case, and also that internal problems are hard to distinguish from external problems. Take for example lead-poisoning, which seems to have drastically increased violence and impulsiveness in places with leaded gasoline, and I am very skeptical that any internal intervention would have helped people affected by lead poisoning. Similarly we have antidepressants which have a pretty good track record of working for anxiety and depression.
Overall I would say that western culture has a stronger track record of finding scalable solutions to mental problems than any other culture, though competitive pressures certainly have also caused it to adopt a bunch of factors that are now causing people anxiety (though overall western cultures still appear to be the self-reported happiest cultures in the world, as well as the least anxious cultures in the world, based on quick googling).
https://www.fastcompany.com/3016661/what-countries-are-most-anxious-about-around-the-world
There is maybe an argument to be made that what you truly mean by non-modernity is a hunter-gatherer society, but what lives those lives and what levels of anxiety they experiences strikes me as a much harder question.
Weird. Here’s a review article that seems to disagree:
Huh, I would be interested in more evidence on this.