Journal of Neuropsychiatry

Abstract

In contrast to fear and panic, anxiety is a complex bkend of unpleasent emotions and cognitions that is both more oriented to the future and much more diffuse than fear. But like fear, it has not only cognitive/subjective components but also physiological and behavioural components. At the cognitive/subjective level, anxiety involves negative mood, worry about possible future threat or danger, self-preoccupation and a sense of being unable to predict the future threat or to control it if it occurs. The adaptive value of anxiety may be that it helps us plan and prepare for possible threat. In mild to modrate degrees, anxiety actually enhances learning and performance. Although there are many threatening situations that provoke fear or anxiety unconditionally, many of our sources of fear and anxiety are learned. That is, previously neutral and novel stimuli that are repeatedly paired with and reliably predict, frightening or unpleasant events such as various kinds of physical and psychological treuma can acquire the capacity to elicit fear or anxiety themselves. Anxiety disorders all have unrealistic, irrational fears or anxieties of disabling intensity as their principal and most obvious manifestation. DSM-IV-TR recognizes five primary types of anxiety disorders:-

(i) Phobic disorders of the "Specific" or of the "Social" type;

(ii) Panic disorders with or without agoraphobia;

(iii) Generalized Anxiety Disorders;

(iv) Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders; and

(v) Post-traumatic Stress Disorders.