You have a fear of spiders, or of flying, or of crowds. Are you just sitting there suffering? It’s time to try Exposure Therapy!
Exposure therapy is a type of Behavioral Therapy used to help the patient confront a feared situation, object, thought, or memory and dispel its power to produce fear and anxiety. It involves reliving a traumatic experience in a controlled, therapeutic environment.
The Anxiety Disorders can paralyze the sufferer with ever-mounting avoidance behaviors. While successful for the moment, avoidance just sets aside the fear and anxiety triggered by a situation. They are sure to come back, stronger than ever.
Exposure therapy has been shown to be effective with many of the Anxiety Disorders, including Social Phobia (SAD), Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), panic attacks and Panic Disorder, Agoraphobia, Adult Separation Anxiety Disorder (ASAD), Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and specific phobias.
This is the second of a two-part series of articles on Exposure Therapy. It focuses on tips to make your Exposure Therapy successful. Today’s installment has these headings:
- Exposure Therapy: Better in real life or in imagination?
- Tips for successful Exposure Therapy experiences
Yesterday’s Part 1 describes Exposure Therapy and what goes into a typical Exposure Therapy plan:
- Exposure Therapy is based on habituation
- Exposure Therapy counteracts Anxiety Disorders’ avoidance
- Exposure Therapy is a part of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
- Characteristics of a typical Exposure Therapy plan
[Read the entire article...]
Tagged as:
Adult Separation Anxiety Disorder,
Agoraphobia,
Anxiety,
Anxiety Disorder,
Exposure Therapy,
GAD - General Anxiety Disorder,
Panic Attacks,
Panic Disorder,
PTSD - Post Traumatic Stress Disorder,
SAD - Social Phobia,
Specific Phobias
The neighbor’s dog barks night and day. If you have gotten used to it, you have used one of the root principles of Exposure Therapy.
Exposure therapy is a type of Behavioral Therapy used to help the patient confront a feared situation, object, thought, or memory and dispel its power over them. It involves reliving a traumatic experience in a controlled, therapeutic environment.
In a way, Exposure Therapy is related to the old maxim “face your fears,” but instead of jumping into a terror-inducing situation with both feet, therapy usually advocates a carefully planned, gradual approach to alleviating fears.
Exposure therapy has been shown to be effective with many of the Anxiety Disorders, including Social Phobia (SAD), Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), panic attacks and Panic Disorder, Agoraphobia, Adult Separation Anxiety Disorder (ASAD), Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and specific phobias.
This two-part series of articles describes what Exposure Therapy is, and offers tips to make your Exposure Therapy successful. Today’s installment has these headings:
- Exposure Therapy is based on habituation
- Exposure Therapy counteracts Anxiety Disorders’ avoidance
- Exposure Therapy is a part of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
- Characteristics of a typical Exposure Therapy plan
Tomorrow’s part of the article will continue the discussion under these headings:
- Exposure Therapy: Better in real life or in imagination?
- Tips for successful Exposure Therapy experiences
[Read the entire article...]
Tagged as:
Adult Separation Anxiety Disorder,
Agoraphobia,
Anxiety,
Anxiety Disorder,
Exposure Therapy,
GAD - General Anxiety Disorder,
Panic Attacks,
Panic Disorder,
PTSD - Post Traumatic Stress Disorder,
SAD - Social Phobia,
Specific Phobias
Anxiety Disorders in older adults is a huge problem that has been ignored, causing a great deal of unnecessary suffering.
Research on older adults’ Anxiety Disorders lags behind that of other mental conditions, such as depression and Alzheimer’s. Until a few years ago, Anxiety Disorders were believed to decline with age. But now experts are beginning to recognize that Anxiety is as common in the old as in the young, although how and when it appears is distinctly different in older adults.
Sadly, because of the lack of information on Anxiety Disorders in older adults, especially in how to diagnose them, many go undiagnosed and untreated. James Maddux and Barbara Winstead state: 1
[I]n comparison to other diagnoses (e.g. depression) less is known about the etiology [causes], including clinical characteristics, course, treatment, and prognosis of anxiety disorders in late life. … Because anxiety disorders are difficult to diagnose in older adults, they are often undiagnosed.
Yet, late-life Anxiety Disorders are what Keri-Leigh Cassidy and Neil Rector call a “sleeping geriatric giant.” Anxiety Disorders are twice as prevalent as dementia among older adults, and 4 to 8 times more prevalent than major depressive disorders, causing significant impact on the quality of life, morbidity, and mortality of older adults.2
The annual U.S. health care costs due to late-life Anxiety Disorders in 1990 was estimated to be $42.3 billion. The numbers are surely higher now, and likely to go higher yet as the Baby Boomer generation grows older.3
This post is the first in a two-part series on the Anxiety Disorders in older adults. Tomorrow’s post addresses the diagnosis and treatment of Anxiety Disorders, and gives some tips on how to tell if your parent or loved one is suffering from them. This post covers the following topics:
- How prevalent are Anxiety Disorders in older adults?
- What are the most common Anxiety Disorders in older adults?
- Anxiety Disorders in older adults are strongly linked with depression
- What are the risk factors for Anxiety Disorders in older adults?
[Read the entire article...]
Tagged as:
Agoraphobia,
Anxiety Disorder,
Elderly,
Elders,
GAD - General Anxiety Disorder,
OCD - Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder,
Panic Disorder,
SAD - Social Phobia,
Specific Phobias
Why are there so many names for phobias? Why can’t we just agree on one for each?
If you have the fear of newness or novelty, you get to choose among 8 terms: Cainophobia, Cainotophobia, Cenophobia, Centophobia, Kainolophobia, Kainophobia, Kainotophobia, and Neophobia. The fear of being touched has 6 names to describe it, and the fear of odors has 7!
Regrettably, the fellow on the right has only two terms to describe his fear of needles: Aichmophobia and Belonephobia. Maybe we could come up with a couple of others: stickophobia or ouchaphobia. Or if you’re classically trained: neraphobia, from the Latin root “nere,” or nemaphobia from the Greek “nema, ” both meaning “needle.”
Today’s post is a lighthearted look at all the multiple names given to phobias, complete with a cartoon. The topic is explored under the headings:
- What are phobias, anyway?
- Why are there so many names for the same phobia?
- A big old list: Multiple names for the same phobia
[Read the entire article...]
Tagged as:
Anxiety,
Anxiety Disorder,
Panic Attack,
Phobias,
Specific Phobias
Suicidal behavior has not been associated with the Anxiety Disorders alone until recently.
It has long been known that as many as 90 percent of suicides in the United States are associated with mental illness, especially substance abuse disorders, schizophrenia, and mood disorders such as depression. Up to 75 percent of all people with depression, schizophrenia or other mental illnesses who attempt or complete suicide also are diagnosed with one or more of the Anxiety Disorders.
As recently as 1999, the Surgeon General could only say that, ” it is likely that the rate of comorbid [simultaneous] anxiety in suicide is underestimated.” There had been no studies at the time of Anxiety Disorder alone being a risk factor for suicide.
However, since then there have been a number of studies of the risks of Anxiety Disorders alone for suicide. It has been universally found that the suicide risk in patients with Anxiety Disorders is much higher than previously thought. Bob Montgomery and Laurel Morris say,
Patients with anxiety problems, especially but not only panic problems, suffer an unexpectedly high rate of heart disease and suicide. Suicide has long been recognized as a risk associated with depression. But [when] researchers compared a group of anxious with a matched group of depressed patients and found that the suicide rates for anxious patients were equal to or slightly higher than for the depressed patients.
This post summarizes some landmark studies from the past three years that have proven Anxiety Disorders, both alone and in association with other mental illnesses, are a significant risk factor for suicidal ideation, attempts, and completions.
[Read the entire article...]
Tagged as:
Agoraphobia,
Anxiety Disorder,
GAD - General Anxiety Disorder,
OCD - Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder,
Panic Disorder,
SAD - Social Phobia,
Specific Phobias,
Suicide
by Mike Nichols on September 23, 2008 · 5 comments
Modern psychiatry has long held that Anxiety Disorder and depression are two distinct conditions.
However, in the real world, many suffer from both. Surveys show that half of Anxiety Disorder sufferers also have symptoms of clinical depression. And 60-70 percent of people with major depression also have an Anxiety Disorder.
Evidence is growing that they are really two aspects of one disorder. Looking at them that way, some experts say, could speed the development of therapy and medications that better treat both conditions.
David Barlow, director of the Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders at Boston University, states that:
[Anxiety Disorders and depression are] probably two sides of the same coin. The genetics seem to be the same; the neurobiology seems to overlap.
This post explores several similarities between Anxiety Disorders and depression, along with the risks of getting both disorders, the benefits of early treatment, and a summary of how the disorders are treated together.
[Read the entire article...]
Tagged as:
Anxiety Disorder,
Depression,
OCD - Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder,
Panic Attacks,
Panic Disorder,
PTSD - Post Traumatic Stress Disorder,
SAD - Social Phobia,
Specific Phobias
by Mike Nichols on September 15, 2008 · 0 comments
by Mike Nichols on August 28, 2008 · 1 comment
Anxiety is the most common mental disorder experienced by older adults.
Anxiety Disorders affect over 18 percent of people over the age of 60. As many as 7 percent of this age group have Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), a disorder characterized by uncontrollable worries about everyday things.
Despite its prevalence, Anxiety Disorders remain one of the most undiagnosed and undertreated conditions in this age group. This is due to the failure of the current model of the primary care physician as gatekeeper model.
Eric J. Lenze, M.D., assistant professor of psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, says,
Studies have shown that generalized anxiety disorder is more common in the elderly … than depression, which affects about 3 percent of seniors. Surprisingly, there is little research that has been done on this disorder in the elderly.
Due to the lack of evidence, doctors often think that this disorder is rare in the elderly or that it is a normal part of aging, so they don’t diagnose or treat anxiety in their older patients, when, in fact, anxiety is quite common in the elderly and can have a serious impact on quality of life.
[Read the entire article...]
Tagged as:
Agoraphobia,
Anxiety Disorder,
Elderly,
Elders,
GAD - General Anxiety Disorder,
OCD - Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder,
Panic Attacks,
Panic Disorder,
primary care physician,
Psychiatrist,
Psychologist,
PTSD - Post Traumatic Stress Disorder,
SAD - Social Phobia,
Specific Phobias
Dogs! Mice! Needles! Insects! Cuts! Heights!
The list goes on and on. These are all known as Specific Phobias, and they are all the butt of many jokes.
But they are not a joke to many, many people. It is estimated by the National Institute of Mental Health that 19 million Americans have some sort of Specific Phobia.
A Specific Phobia is a type of Anxiety Disorder. It is a strong, irrational fear of something that poses little or no actual danger.
There are many Specific Phobias. Acrophobia is a fear of heights. You may be able to ski the world’s tallest mountains but not be able to go above the 3rd floor of an office building. You may be able to drive a car but be unable to enter an elevator. Other common phobias involve tunnels, highway driving, water, flying, animals and blood.
What exactly are Specific Phobias? What are the causes? How are they treated? Continue reading for answers to these and other questions (and a comic bonus!).
[Read the entire article...]
Tagged as:
Agoraphobia,
Anxiety Disorder,
GAD - General Anxiety Disorder,
Panic Attacks,
SAD - Social Phobia,
Specific Phobias
Do you treat your mental health issue with medication only?
If you do, you are part of a growing trend among mental health care providers.
This shift to the sole use of medication to treat mental health problems is detailed in a study released this month in the Archives of General Psychology. The authors find that market forces, primarily insurance reimbursements, are forcing psychiatrists to limit their time with patients to 15-minute medication maintenance visits rather than also providing psychotherapy.
The percentage of patients who received both medication and psychotherapy from their psychiatrists fell to 28.9 percent in 2004-05, from 44.4 percent in 1996-97.
The findings are expected to intensify a debate over the increased medicalization of psychiatric care. The debate is about the shifting emphasis on the biology of mental illness, as opposed to the processes of the mind addressed in psychotherapy. This debate is seen in the mental health stances of the two Presidential candidates. McCain’s plan emphasizes the use of medications over psychotherapy, while Obama’s seeks a balance between the two.
[Read the entire article...]
Tagged as:
Anxiety Disorder,
Medications,
Mental Health Professionals,
Panic Disorder,
Psychiatrist,
PTSD - Post Traumatic Stress Disorder,
SAD - Social Phobia,
Specific Phobias
