Photo: Dreamstime In her article titled “Listening to Xanax,” reporter Lisa Miller chronicles “how Americans learned to stop worrying about worry and pop its pills instead.” Miller acknowledges that depression can be a “serious medical problem” that requires medication, but her article focuses on the use of drugs to deal with “low-grade anxiety” about ordinary life (or what she calls functional anxiety ). If the ’90s were the decade of Prozac, then the 2010s have become the era of Xanax. 1   When I recently read the paragraph that I just shared, I can’t say that I was that stunned by its content.