Different Views Of Anxiety Disorders

Anxiety, whether an illness or emotion, is a term with historical roots even in the Bible, but it was not popular until the modern age. Today, we can group, diagnose and treat several anxiety disorders to an extent, but the assessment of symptoms and severity, dealing with resistant conditions, new treatment modalities and specific patient population, such as children, are still the challenging aspects of anxiety disorders. This book intends to present anxiety disorders from a different view and discuss a wide variety of topics in anxiety from a multidimensional approach. This Open Access book addresses not only psychiatrists but also a broad range of specialists, including psychologists, neuroscientists and other mental health professionals.

Anxiety, whether an illness or emotion, is a term with historical roots even in the Bible, but it was not popular until the modern age. Today, we can group, diagnose and treat several anxiety disorders to an extent, but the assessment of symptoms and severity, dealing with resistant conditions, new treatment modalities and specific patient population, such as children, are still the challenging aspects of anxiety disorders. This book intends to present anxiety disorders from a different view and discuss a wide variety of topics in anxiety from a multidimensional approach. This Open Access book addresses not only psychiatrists but also a broad range of specialists, including psychologists, neuroscientists and other mental health professionals.

In this book, we focus on children with anxiety disorders and the children whose parents were diagnosed with anxiety disorders in their lifetime. The aim is to investigate the different types of anxiety disorders with different underlying mechanisms. The developmental perspective will support a better understanding of the development of anxiety disorders and transition from childhood to adulthood. We believe this book will appeal to a wide audience of practicing psychiatrists, psychologists, psychiatric nurses, social workers and mental health professionals. It is our hope that many will find this book useful for training mental health professionals to give them the newest developmental point of view about prototype anxiety disorders. We dedicate this book to our lovely families, patients, and their families.

When behavior therapy was first applied to what would now be labeled an anxiety disorder, a simplistic theoretical model guided the treatment of a sim ple phobia. Time and research have shown that the techniques of behavior ther apy have been more successful than its models have been explanatory. Yet progress has been substantial in both realms, as the following volume makes patently clear. In 1980 an inventory of this progress was catalogued at an NIMH-sponsored workshop. What both that workshop and this volume clearly show is that the behav ior therapy researcher need no longer suffer the epithet "overly simplistic." One of the major strengths of this volume is its elucidation of the complexities that now attend the study of the anxiety disorders, particularly from a behav ioral point of view. The researcher at times appears almost to be buried in a landslide of complexities regarding this topic. The concept of anxiety itself has undergone a differentiation to a level of complexity that poses problems for both the conceptualization and the treat ment of anxiety disorders. In virtually one voice, the several authors of this volume argue the multidimensional nature of anxiety. The "lump" view of anx iety has given way to the three-channel view of anxiety. An investigator's future research career could well be secured just by spending time puzzling out the significance of the low intercorrelations among the channels.

Anxiety is one of those entltles which everyone "knows", but which ultimately resists simple objective description. The essence of the phenomenon is its subjectivity. True it has its well documented associated physiological events: the increased pulse rate and blood pressure, sweating, and so on, but each of these phenomena may also be part of physical exertion, fear, or even pleasurable excitement. They cannot fully define the sense of threat, danger, collapse, malignancy in greater or smaller amount, in greater or lesser locali sation, with more or less objective evidence for its validity that characterises the particular psychological pain we all recognize as anxiety. It is precisely the essential subjectivity of anxiety and its association with an enormous range of experience that makes it difficult to assign to it well-defined diagnostic labels of the kinds so carefully described by Dr. Spitzer in his chapter on classification. His chapter ranges from the extreme dread of "Panic Disorders", to the diffuse terror of the environment which used to be labelled "Agoraphobia" (and is still so called in the day to day pragmatic usage of many clinics) and is not assimilated to the class of phobias with the label "Social Phobias". He also addresses the "Simple Phobias" which are perhaps the most readily labelled of the many varieties of anxiety.

First published in 1990. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

It is estimated that approximately ten percent of teenagers and forty percent of adults suffer from an anxiety disorder of some kind. This collection of essays provides an overview of anxiety disorders and their impact on teens. Chapters examine test anxiety, separation anxiety, social anxiety, post-traumatic stress and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Readers will examine the importance of teen mental health checkups, current treatment opinions, and related controversies. Essay sources include Good Morning America, the Medical College of Wisconsin, and Anxiety Disorders Association of America.