Читать книгу Anxiety For Dummies - W. Doyle Gentry, Laura L. Smith - Страница 35

Every so many years, groups of mental health professionals provide research and clinical experience in order to develop a list of emotional disorders. They publish their findings in a manual referred to as the DSM. Currently, the field is using the fifth edition. The diagnoses allow professionals to communicate with a common language. However, the formal role of diagnoses has its detractors. Many professionals believe it’s more useful to focus on symptoms as opposed to specific disorders. For your information, the DSM-5 currently lists the following major categories of anxiety disorders:

 Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD)

 Social phobia

 Panic disorder

 Agoraphobia

 Specific phobias

 Separation anxiety disorder

 Selective mutism

 Anxiety disorder due to another medical condition

The previous few editions of DSM categorized obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as anxiety disorders. No longer. Today, OCD has its own section, Obsessive Compulsive Related Disorders, and PTSD is categorized as a Trauma-and Stressor-Related Disorder. The controversies surrounding these changes are complex. And in most people with emotional problems, there are almost always overlapping symptoms. In other words, someone with anxiety is likely to have at least a few symptoms in one diagnostic category and a few others in a different category.

Maurice has social anxiety. Drug and alcohol abuse often accompany social phobia because people with social phobia feel desperate to quell their anxious feelings. And drugs and alcohol offer a quick fix. Unfortunately, that fix often causes additional embarrassment and may lead to an addiction.