Anxiety is a normal part of life, however, it becomes a problem when its excessive. This is when it interferes with your daily activities. It becomes a disorder when it is intense and gets worse overtime. Anxiety disorders can affect a person’s personal, social, academic, and professional lives in addition to interfering with everyday activities.
The Global Burden of Disease result tool indicates that anxiety disorder is the most common of all mental disorders with an estimate of 4 percent of global population affected.
Types of Anxiety Disorders
WHO listed several kinds of Anxiety disorders as follows;
- Generalized Anxiety Disorder: Excessive and ongoing concern for day-to-day tasks or occurrences.
- Social Anxiety Disorder: High feelings of fear and concern surrounding social circumstances that could cause the individual to feel rejected, humiliated, or ashamed.
- Specific Phobias: Severe, unreasonable fears of particular things or circumstances that cause avoidance behavior and severe discomfort.
- Selective Mutism: This predominant in children. It involves persistent difficulty speaking in some social contexts, even though one can talk fluently in other environments.
- Agoraphobia: here a person has extreme fear and worry and tends to avoid circumstances that could cause panics, helplessness and embarrassment.
- Separation Anxiety Disorder: this occurs when a person has extreme fear of losing or being separated from a beloved.
- Panic Disorder: This involves panic attacks and fear of having constant panic attacks.
Symptoms of Anxiety Disorders
A common symptom associated with anxiety disorder is extreme fear or worry about specific situations or even everyday circumstances. This results in panic attacks.
Other symptoms include;
- Difficulty in decision-making and concentration
- Difficulty in falling asleep
- Heart palpitation
- Constant feeling of awaiting danger, or doom
- Restlessness, irritability and tension
- Trembling and shaking
Dangers of Anxiety Disorder:
Anxiety disorder exposes people to depression, substance use disorder and suicidal thoughts including actual suicide attempts
Who can have Anxiety Disorder?
Anxiety disorder like other mental conditions can affect anyone. However, those that are at high risk are persons who have been abused, sexually, physically or emotionally. Also, persons who have encountered severe losses and those with underlying medical conditions are at risk of anxiety disorder.
Furthermore, WHO states that girls and women are at higher risk of anxiety disorder than boys and men.
How to treat of Anxiety Disorder?
Treatment can be done with psychological interventions which involves talk therapy with professionals.
Also Anti-depressant medications can be used for treatment.
At Bestherapy we utilize talk therapy and in cases that require medication, anti-depressants can be prescribed for the patients.