What is Anxiety Disorder?
A brief explanation of what is anxiety disorder would be to simply say that it is extreme and incapacitating nervousness. It is an illness in which an individual has a fear of either a situation, a place, or a thing. The fear can either be of something real or imagined, logical or irrational.
Everyone gets nervous at one time or another in life, but a person with anxiety disorder is often unable to function normally because of the crippling fear. The sufferer will often do just about anything to avoid the uncomfortable symptoms associated with it. Symptoms may include sweating, slurred speech, inability to speak, rapid heart beat, racing thoughts, urge to run, fainting, more nervousness, and imagined ridicule from others.
There are several types of these illnesses. Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is a general fear of any and all situations. A person with this sickness could be afraid to drive, scared of falling ill, or nervous about going grocery shopping. With GAD the doctor normally can not specify what the patient’s specific fear is, so he labels him or her with this standard illness.
One of the more specific types nervousness illness is social anxiety disorder. In cases of SAD the individual is afraid of social settings or people. The fear is not of the people themselves, but more of being ridiculed, judged, or embarrassed by those people. The sufferer may have had a traumatic embarrassing situation occur earlier in life. Perhaps he or she was wrongfully judged by someone. If the tendency to develop this ailment was there, then one bad experience could have easily made it develop. No specific incident necessarily causes a case of SAD though.
Suffers of this specific version are known to avoid social situations at all costs. In severe cases, a man or woman who is ill may never leave his or her home.
Obsessive compulsive disorder is a dual affliction that involves recurring obsessive nervous thoughts and compulsive actions that are performed to ease the terror from such thoughts. For example, an individual with obsessive compulsive disorder may have a disturbing fear of germs and will wash his or her hands several hundred times a day to avoid them.
Other illnesses that describe what is anxiety disorder are post traumatic stress disorder, panic attacks, and specific phobias. All of these are classified in the same category and have the overall main symptom of an extreme sense of fear.
Treatment for this mental disability will usually require prescription medications and some form of therapy. An anti-depressant may be prescribed for a person with post traumatic stress disorder because depression may occur. Normally anti anxiety drugs are given.
In addition to receiving medication, a patient should enroll in therapy sessions to learn how to manage the negative thoughts that are causing the fears. With enough time and care, the effects of any disorder can be reduced significantly. Hopefully they can be managed enough to where the patient can function normally in most of his or her life tasks.
A brief explanation of what is anxiety disorder would be to simply say that it is extreme and incapacitating nervousness. It is an illness in which an individual has a fear of either a situation, a place, or a thing. The fear can either be of something real or imagined, logical or irrational.
Everyone gets nervous at one time or another in life, but a person with anxiety disorder is often unable to function normally because of the crippling fear. The sufferer will often do just about anything to avoid the uncomfortable symptoms associated with it. Symptoms may include sweating, slurred speech, inability to speak, rapid heart beat, racing thoughts, urge to run, fainting, more nervousness, and imagined ridicule from others.
There are several types of these illnesses. Generalized anxiety disorder is a general fear of any and all situations. A person with this sickness could be afraid to drive, scared of falling ill, or nervous about going grocery shopping. With GAD the doctor normally can not specify what the patient’s specific fear is, so he labels him or her with this standard illness.
One of the more specific types nervousness illness is social anxiety disorder. In cases of SAD the individual is afraid of social settings or people. The fear is not of the people themselves, but more of being ridiculed, judged, or embarrassed by those people. The sufferer may have had a traumatic embarrassing situation occur earlier in life. Perhaps he or she was wrongfully judged by someone. If the tendency to develop this ailment was there, then one bad experience could have easily made it develop. No specific incident necessarily causes a case of SAD though.
Suffers of this specific version are known to avoid social situations at all costs. In severe cases, a man or woman who is ill may never leave his or her home.
Obsessive compulsive disorder is a dual affliction that involves recurring obsessive nervous thoughts and compulsive actions that are performed to ease the terror from such thoughts. For example, an individual with obsessive compulsive disorder may have a disturbing fear of germs and will wash his or her hands several hundred times a day to avoid them.
Other illnesses that describe what is anxiety disorder are post traumatic stress disorder, panic attacks, and specific phobias. All of these are classified in the same category and have the overall main symptom of an extreme sense of fear.
Treatment for this mental disability will usually require prescription medications and some form of therapy. An anti-depressant may be prescribed for a person with post traumatic stress disorder because depression may occur. Normally anti anxiety drugs are given.
In addition to receiving medication, a patient should enroll in therapy sessions to learn how to manage the negative thoughts that are causing the fears. With enough time and care, the effects of any disorder can be reduced significantly. Hopefully they can be managed enough to where the patient can function normally in most of his or her life tasks.
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That was a useful article and I would just like to say that most of us get frightened on occasion – we would not be human if we did not experience a little anxiety in our lives. However some people have extreme anxiety while others have slight anxiety. The difference would be anybody who lived with repeated anxiety attacks caused by an underlying problem similar to obsessive compulsive disorder or panic disorder. All these circumstances shouldn’t be compared with those who suffer the pain of anxiety over ordinary things such as taking an exam or beginning a new job. That is quite mormal for most people.
DAD or ADD, SAD or OCD. There are so many documented clinical conditions; it makes me wonder if doctors aren’t just giving a medical label to any sort of emotion. I suppose if an individual tries to live life, he would be diagnosed to be an OPP (obsessively positive person). Actually I don’t mean to mean to make fun of these because I believe my father suffers from an acute form of OCD. He is so obsessed with conserving everything, that I think there should be a new diagnosis for his condition: OCS (obsessive cheap skate) or OCHEAP.
With all the alphabet soup of medical disorders and all the prescription drugs on the market, I think it is important for people to get as much information as they can about alternative forms of medication. That is, if they value their health and the condition of their heart in the long term. There is a lot of prescription drug abuse going on and this unsupervised abuse of drug cocktails is causing the death of many young people – even some famous young people in recent years (e.g. Heath Ledger, Amy Winehouse).
Can you tell me if OCD is the most common Anxiety disorder to date? Is there another form of OCD where the person doesn’t really have the obsessive nervous thought that terrify them but they do have a strange completion to repeat certain things every time they do it, not necessarily within minutes or seconds of each other but everyday maybe. For example when I eat chips or French fries I always have to pick through them and eat the smallest ones first, always. Is that a form of OCD?
I have met at least two people who suffered panic attacks’, as they put it. One of those persons was a recreational user of the prescription drug, zanex. The drug made her manic and when she stopped taking it, the withdrawl symptoms were violent convulsions while she slept and anxiety. I wonder if her drug use resulted from already having anxiety disorder or if suddenly stopping the use of the drug, after long term use, might cause some chemical imbalance in the brain. I didn’t know there existed natural alternatives which can relieve or cure anxiety. Or can they? Are they a panacea for anxiety, requiring you to continue to take it or is there such a thing as a permanent cure? Is anxiety a permanent chemical makeup some people are prepositioned to?