Introduction
Anxiety and fear are the common experiences for any person involved in high risk situations covering life and death consequences. Anxiety disorder is a psychological disorder which is characterized by unrealistic fear and anxiety. There are several variants of anxiety related disorders. Sometimes, such feelings will result in psychological disorders in which the individuals suffer from a belief that they are caught up with some disease. This is essentially a psychological disorder for which there is identifiable medical basis. These disorders are known as Somatoform disorders (Dorfman & Walker, 2007). There are various causes which lead to different types of disorders. This paper analyzes the causes of different types of anxiety related disorders.
Abnormality
Abnormality is the deviation from a statistically based approach and the deviation from the ideal standard toward which most people are striving. Abnormality can also be stated as the inability to function effectively in that people are unable to adjust to the demands of society. Even stable people may sometimes breakdown when they are forced to face the situations of extensive torture or natural disaster; and for some other people even performing their daily routine chores may be fearsome. For instance being on an airplane may make some people -seriously fearful or anxious. The most important abnormalities of mood are depression, anxiety, and elation. It is possible to infer affective disorders from altered behaviors of people.
Anxiety Disorders
Anxiety may cause fear which is an emotional, physical and behavioral response to an immediately recognizable external threat. The feeling of anxiety is a distressing, unpleasant, emotional state of nervousness and uneasiness. It is difficult to clearly assess the causes of anxiety. Anxiety-a general feeling of apprehension about possible danger was in Freud’s formulation, a sign of inner battle or conflict between some primitive desire (from the id) and prohibitions against its expression (from the ego and super-ego). There is a group of disorders which share obvious symptoms and features of fear and anxiety and these are known as anxiety disorders.
Causes of Anxiety and related Disorders
Anxiety is a fear-like emotion. Anxiety is a psychological and physiological state. This state is characterized by cognitive, somatic, emotional and behavioral components. These components act together to create a feeling which is not only unpleasant but also is associated with uneasiness, fear or worry. The behavioral model underpins the development of response and stimulus hierarchies that lead to increase in anxiety or fear for any specific stimuli. Use of exposure to such situation would provide the patient with an experience of habituation. This experience of habituation to the feared stimulus develops a disconfirmation that the stimulus needed to be avoided because the patient associates the stimulus with conferred danger. The disconfirmation is the cognitive aspect in the process of developing the anxiety disorder.
Components of anxiety response system include cognitive aspects like “attentional shift and hypervigilance, nervousness and difficulty concentrating”. Aggression and/or avoidance are the behavioral components normally associated with anxiety disorders.
Biological contributions to anxiety include diathesis-stress which inherits vulnerabilities for anxiety and panic. Such inherent vulnerabilities lead to anxiety and brain circuits – GABA, noradrenergic and serotonergic systems.
Generalized anxiety disorders which consist of excessive and unrealistic worries may last for a period of six months or more. In addition to chronic worries the disorder may include symptoms like trembling, muscular aches, insomnia, dizziness and irritability (DualDiagnosis, 2007).
Anxiety at some level can be perceived as adaptive. With a clear understanding of the anxiety people can prepare, rehearse and practice to make their responses or functioning as normal as possible. Such practice may also help them to be appropriately cautious in potentially dangerous situations. However this is possible only up to a certain level, beyond which, anxiety develops dysfunction and undue distress in people. At this stage, anxiety turns out to be maladaptive and is considered as a disorder.
Even though anxiety occurs over several physical and mental disorder levels, it is considered to be the predominant symptom of several disorders. Anxiety disorders are commonly found in people than any other class of psychiatric disorders. Generally they are not recognized as serious disorders and therefore are not subjected to any treatments.
Causes of Mood Disorders
The family of mood disorders consists of a heterogeneous group of conditions. These conditions share common mood regulation difficulties. The first in the list is ‘unipolar major depression; which refers to an episode where there is a serious compromise of the mood. It also evidences four additional depressive symptoms:
- loss of energy,
- low self-worth,
- guilt and suicidal ideation
- sleep disturbance or appetite disturbance.
The second is the ‘bipolar depression’ exhibits more manic or mixed episodes which are depressive. The third is the dysthymia which refers to the a mood disturbance that will last up to two years.
Learned helplessness is one of the causes of mood disorders. It is a state in which people come to the conclusion that unpleasant or aversive stimuli cannot be controlled. People under the mood disorders arrive at a view of the world that is so ingrained in their mind that they stop trying to remedy the aversive circumstances. They cease to take any action even if they are in a position to exert some influence if they do it willingly.
Dissociative Disorder
Everyone have an occasional experience of failing to integrate the memories, perceptions, identity and consciousness. However such failure to integrate memories does not cause a disruption in carrying out every day routine jobs. It usually happens that people with a dissociative disorder might forget a series of normal behavior that would have happened in minutes or hours. They normally sense that they have missed a period of time in their experience. “People may experience the following:
- Poorly integrated memory (dissociative amnesia)
- Fragmentation of identity and memory (dissociative fugue or dissociative identity disorder)
- Disruption of experience and self-perception (depersonalization disorder).” (Simeon, 2008)
Causes for Dissociative Disorder
Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) is caused by (i) an innate ability to dissociate easily, (ii) repeated episodes of severe physical or sexual abuse in childhood, (iii) lack of a supportive or comforting person to counteract abusive relatives or (iv) influence of other relatives with dissociative symptoms of disorders. The severe and prolonged trauma experienced during the childhood is considered to be the primary cause of DID. Emotional, physical or sexual abuse or a combination of these may cause the trauma leading to DID. It is found that a manufactured alter may be subjected to the suffering while the primary identity escapes from the torturous experience. Since to dissociate in the young age is relatively easier, it becomes a defense for children.
Somatoform Disorders
Somatization is an expression indicating mental phenomena as physical symptoms. Somatoform disorders possess the character of physical symptoms which cannot be fully explained by any other physical or mental disorders. They are not normal disorders by volition. Somatoform disorders can be distressful impairing the social and occupational aspects of functioning. Such disorders also affect academic aspects of individuals. Body dsymorphic disorder, conversion disorder, hypochondriasis and pain disorder are some of the forms of somatoform disorders (Walter & Scheidt, 2006).
Causes for Somatoform Disorder
Although no definite cause has been established for somatoform disorders, genetic and environmental influences appear mostly to lead to somatoform disorders. Especially children raised in homes with a high degree of parental somatization may be subjected to this kind of disorder. Sexual abuse is another reason that is found to cause somatization. Poor ability to express one’s emotions (alexithymia) may also lead to somatoform disorders (Yates, 2008).
References
Dorfman, W. I., & Walker, L. E. (2007). First Responder’s Guide to Abnormal Psychology. USA: Springler US.
DualDiagnosis. (2007). Chapter 6 – Anxiety Disorders. Web.
Simeon, D. (2008). Dissociative Disorder. Web.
Walter, E., & Scheidt, C. E. (2006). Somatoform disorders as disorders of affect regulation: A development perspective. International Review of Psychiatry , 18 (1), 13-24.
Yates, W. R. (2008). Somatoform Disorders. Web.