Anxiety Disorders

Everyone from time to time gets nervous about things, especially things beyond our control. Our response helps us to deal with the event. But when the anxiety becomes incapacitating, often called panic attacks, or it affects our health, then it is a mood disorder. I mention anxiety first because it not only can be a result of other mood disorders it often is one of the causes of the other mood disorder.

For help with fear please see the article Managing Your Persistent Fears, Depression, and Anxieties

Anxiety

With the anxiety disorder people often pass through several stages of anxiety on their way to total incapacitation, and maybe not in this order.

panic attacks, when the body goes haywire:
1. pounding heart
2. light headiness
3. that "scared" feeling; a sensation that your going to die if you don't get out there -- right now!
A misconception that their suffering symptoms of every major terminal disease there is.
The phobic stage, they feel their anxiety about something and then associate it with their present circumstance.

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Posttraumatic stress

Another form of anxiety or stress is Posttraumatic stress disorder which involves a severe reaction to some catastrophic event. People who suffer from PTSD can experience phobic avoidance, difficulties in concentration, and guilt that they survived. Victims commonly reexperience the trauma in dreams and flashbacks; they become numb to the world and feel detached from it.

It is important to remember that it is not a matter of using willpower to manage this illness. In most cases doctors have found that antidepressants or anti anxiety medication have some effect on controlling the panic attacks, because these generalized attacks may spring from a mysterious imbalance in the brain.

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Compulsive Disorders

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

OCD involves obsessions, compulsions or both. Obsessions are recurrent distressing impulses that the person recognizes as senseless. Compulsions are seemingly purposeful rituals that are performed repeatedly in the same way every time.

Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder

OCPD involves inflexible attitudes, perfectionism, a rigid sense of morality, and a preoccupation with rules and details. People with this illness are perceived as exceptionally moralistic and conscientious. Their perfectionism produces emotional distress because they rarely feel they are good enough. In dealing with others they tend to be emotionally restricted.

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Treatments

For a person diagnosed as having an anxiety disorder there are four targets of treatment:

Control the physical symptoms of the disease with medications
Deal with the phobias with behavioral therapy
Deal with the psychosocial stress with counseling
Manage the anxiety to minimize possibility of relapse

Resourses

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