Anxiety Disorders: what are they and how are they diagnosed?
Written in association with:
Psychiatrist
Published: 20/03/2023
Edited by: Aoife Maguire
What are the most common anxiety disorders?
There are three main groups of anxiety disorders. One group is generalised anxiety disorder, where the patient is anxious about anything and everything.
The second is specific anxiety disorders, which manifest in certain situations. They are referred to as phobias, for example anxiety of flying or anxiety of water / phobia of flying and phobia of water etc.
The third group is anxiety, where anxiety is the underlying symptom but gives rise to more complex, specific symptoms. For example, OCD, is primarily based on anxiety. Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is an anxiety disorder primarily and anxiety is also common in addictions such as gambling. They are conditions where there is a different category but anxiety actually leads that condition.
A common example of a specifc anxiety disorder is social phobia/social anxiety, which is very common among the early teenagers and early adults and can develop in later life.
Generalised anxiety disorder is common among people aged 50-60 years old and older.
How severe can an anxiety disorder become?
Anxiety disorder can be mild, so mild that it may not be diagnosed. Your or your doctor may miss it and it may be so mild that it doesn’t interfere with daily life.
On the other hand, can also be very severe, it can be debilitating. It can impact on your social functioning, finances, relationships and it can affect your physical health, as well as your mental health. It can be debilitating and chronic and can put you out of work for several years.
There is really no limit to the severity of anxiety disorders. One thing that is important for anxiety to be diagnosed as a disorder is that it must impact on your well-being, because just being anxious itself may not be an illness.
At what stage should someone seek treatment and medical advice for their anxiety?
This goes back to how anxiety affects your well-being. Doctors recognise anxiety as a natural emotion and therefore just being anxious itself could be a normal psychological response to situations and events.
However, when that response is followed by other symptoms or it leads to you to being unable to enjoy life, not being able to perform your social functions and not being able to have a good quality of life then that anxiety becomes a disorder and you should seek help for anxiety.
By the time this occurs, doctors find that there are other symptoms, that accompany anxiety and they aren’t just suffering from anxiety alone. People should seek help when they find that any aspects of their well-being is being affected by anxiety.
What should people try to avoid doing if they have an anxiety disorder?
One thing that is common with people who have anxiety disorder is to self-medicate. Self-medication is rewarding in the short term, e.g. you feel anxious and you take some alcohol, you take some calming tablets and it helps you but what that does is tell your mind that only if you take this tablet, take a bit more of it, that you’ll feel even better.
The more you self-medicate with sedatives or alcohol, or drugs, the more your brain becomes wired to depend on them for relieving your anxiety.
Consequently, you go from suffering from anxiety, to go on to develop other, potentially more serious addictions, in addition to the impacts of these substances on your physical health. Therefore the general advice is not to self medicate anxiety symptoms but to seek profesional health.
How are anxiety disorders diagnosed?
As with every condition, it is important for doctors to know the history of the patient. Doctors will listen to the patient’s symptoms, especially as how they are presented.
By listening to the patients and to the other symptoms, they should identify the symptoms of anxiety.
These symptoms can come in different forms. They may be physical, psychological or may be conginitive in terms of our thoughts. If doctors listen to them and look at them, they can find a pattern of when these symptoms first started, how they interact among themsleves and the person’s own experience or suffering, to help them diagnose anxiety.
This can also aid doctors to differentiate anixety from other conditions. As previously mentioned, by listening to the patient’s own story, doctors are able to decide whether these symptoms are caused by anxiety or whether there are other explanations for these symptoms.