Forget the red Porsches, promiscuous escapades, and questionable clothing choices. The real marker of a midlife crisis seems to be a much more serious issue that is difficult to treat, and Americans appear to deal with it more often than their peers.
In the late 1950s, a psychoanalyst named Elliott Jaques was the first to argue that people in their mid-thirties, primarily men, could experience a yearslong bout of depression brought on by the realization of one’s own mortality. Thus, the “midlife crisis” was born, exhibited by a sudden urge to seize control of respective circumstances and to reinvent oneself in increasingly improbable ways.
