Test Your Knowledge

There are five major categories of anxiety disorders. All share the quality of excessive and irrational fear. The fear may be of a specific object or situation (e.g., spiders or public speaking), or it may be generalized fear that the patient feels without being able to identify a specific source of that fear. Although each anxiety disorder has its own distinct features, in all cases the patient’s fear dramatically reduces productivity and/or significantly diminishes quality of life. The categories include:

• Generalized anxiety disorder. Diagnosed when a person worries excessively about all types of life issues, including health, family, money and work, for six months or longer. Patients with this disorder may find themselves unable to relax, even when there are no signs of trouble in their lives.
  
  
• Obsessive-compulsive disorder. Diagnosed when a person is helpless to control intrusive and unwanted thoughts (obsessions) and/or to stop performing ritual actions (compulsions), such as counting, handwashing or repetitively checking locks.
  
  
• Panic disorder. Diagnosed when a person regularly experiences panic attacks – sudden episodes of fear and anxiety that usually last for between 10 and 30 minutes and cause symptoms such as racing heartbeat, heavy sweating and shortness of breath. In some cases, panic disorder may be accompanied by agoraphobia, a condition in which patients fear being caught in a place or situation in which escape might be difficult, or being trapped in circumstances in which medical help might not be available during a panic attack. In other cases, panic disorder actually causes agoraphobia.
  
  
• Phobias. Diagnosed when a person has extreme and irrational fears of something that in actuality poses little or no threat. Social phobia (also known as social anxiety disorder) involves a fear of being judged by others, whereas people with specific phobias suffer from intense fear of certain objects (such as fear of snakes) or situations (such as fear of heights). Agoraphobia is a phobia closely related to panic disorder (see above). People with phobias avoid objects or situations that they view as threatening.
  
  
• Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Diagnosed when a patient who has experienced a traumatic event such as war, rape, child abuse or a natural disaster begins to have nightmares, flashbacks, depression or other symptoms for more than a month. Stress disorders that occur within a month of the traumatic event are known as acute stress disorders.