Anxiety Disorders: Everything You Need to Know (Your Personal Health) - Softcover

Caldwell MD CCFP, Paul

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1552978745 ISBN 13: 9781552978740

Publisher: Firefly Books, 2005

Synopsis

Anxiety disorders are the most common mental illness in the United States.

Afflicting 19.1 million American adults between the ages of 15 and 54 (or 13% of the population), anxiety disorders are so common today it is impossible to remain untouched by them, directly or indirectly.

While fear and anxiety can serve as tools for survival, uncontrolled they lead to serious health concerns. Despite these facts and the known risks, few feel the need to educate themselves about the various dangers caused by anxiety until a medical crisis forces them to take action.

Anxiety Disorders explains the medical conditions and jargon used by medical professionals to describe and treat the problems caused by anxiety. The book identifies the origins of, symptoms and treatments for:

• Panic attacks
• Obsessive-compulsive behavior
• Post-traumatic stress
• Phobias

Anxiety disorders are by definition terrifying and crippling, but they are treatable. Dr. J. Paul Caldwell provides comprehensive, accurate, reassuring and up-to-date information for patients, caregivers and families.

Vetted by an esteemed roundtable of medical experts, Anxiety Disorders offers practical and consumer-oriented health advice.

About this title

About the Author:

J. Paul Caldwell, MD, CCFC (C), is a family physician with 25 years' experience is also an award-winning journalist and author of Sleep: Everything You Need to Know and co-author of Eating Disorders and Alzheimer's Disease, all published by Firefly.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Introduction

As a family physician, I am privileged to spend my working days treating illness and trying to relieve suffering and pain. Often, thanks to the efficacy of modern medicine, that's not a difficult task. At my disposal I have antibiotics for infections, analgesics for pain and a vast collection of other drugs and treatments for almost any symptom of physical illness you can imagine. Give me a symptom and I can quickly and adeptly begin to help relieve suffering. On most days, and for most medical difficulties, mine is a very rewarding job.

Sometimes, though, it's just not that simple. With problems such as anxiety disorders, the underlying difficulties that produce pain and suffering are not transparently evident, obvious or accessible. They are much more difficult to conceptualize, and they take a great deal of time and effort to understand. Healing is not a simple process.

Of course, we are all anxious, we all worry, we are all "stressed out." The ability to worry, to anticipate negative consequences or events, is a remarkable human ability. Because it allows us to visualize what might happen in the future, it allows us to begin to prepare for such eventualities. In that sense, anxiety and worry are adaptive and protective; for most of us, anxiety is a good thing -- an evolutionary system that makes our lives better.

Unfortunately, for almost a quarter of us, the experience of anxiety is different. Instead of being helpful and accommodating, anxiety becomes intensely uncomfortable and disabling. Although we use the same word -- anxiety -- it is important to understand that the experience is different from the normal in two important dimensions. The experience of abnormal anxiety -- the feeling associated with it -- is much more intense than that of normal anxiety. Far from being helpful or protecting, abnormal anxiety disrupts the usual activities and delights of life -- it disables. The combination of these two qualities produces the extreme suffering and pain seen with these disorders, and prevents the normal enjoyment of life.

That's what this book is about. These problems are difficult to visualize and to understand. It is often impossible to identify their specific causes (why this happens to one particular person at this particular time), and they are very complicated, often occurring with other psychological difficulties. Although they are hard to conceptualize, the pain and disability they produce are every bit as real as those of easily visible physical illnesses. They cannot be "seen" in the same way that a fractured bone might be, but they are not imagined or fabricated. The suffering that they produce is excruciating in its severity and prolonged in its duration, often lasting a lifetime.

The book is organized into the several common patterns of anxiety disorders.

• Generalized anxiety disorder is a pattern of excessive worrying over simple everyday occurrences and events.
• Social anxiety disorder (sometimes called social phobia) is a common problem of anxiety related to your perception of how you are assessed by others in a social environment.
• Panic disorder is a pattern of recurring episodes of extreme acute anxiety (the panic attack) and the changes that these make in your behavior.
• Phobias are severe unreasonable fear reactions to everyday objects or situations.
• Post traumatic stress disorder is a collection of anxiety symptoms related to a previous emotionally damaging event.
• Obsessive-compulsive disorder is a combination of disturbing intrusive thoughts (obsessions) and their responses (compulsions) performed in order to reduce anxiety.
• Anxiety disorders in children have their own particular characteristics.

The definitions of these patterns of anxiety disorders might seem quite finite, but many similar symptoms and experiences are shared among the disorders, and many share other (so called co-morbid) psychological difficulties, such as depression. The specific definitions of these disorders are, of course, quite artificial, but they allow us to begin to understand them as separate entities, even though they are all related within the same family of disorders of anxiety.

The good news is that anxiety disorders usually respond very well to treatment. With understanding and therapy, which may include lifestyle changes, the pain and suffering that they produce can be relieved. Whether you suffer from an anxiety problem or you are concerned about a friend or loved one, this book is designed to begin the process of treatment by giving you the essential information necessary to understand the problems.

Let us begin by examining the enigmatic feeling at the core of the problem-anxiety.

About this edition

• Publisher: Firefly Books
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1552978745
• ISBN 13: 9781552978740
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176