This next lesson article is what was presented in chapter five dealing with anxiety disorders and how to help clients and patients deal with what is going on with them. In dealing with these kinds of disorders it is all about adaptive fears versus maladaptive anxiety. What is meant by 'adaptive fear' this is when the persons concerns are realistic given the circumstances presented. 'Maladaptive fears' are unrealistic concerns and statistically will not happen and will not hurt too much and will survive. Adaptive fears will result form out of fear when normal fear subsides. Maladaptive fears when the level of threat gets out of proportion to a particular fear. The threat is eliminated but the fear continues and there will be and have an anticipatory fear about the future.
Factors to Anxiety
In a particular context a minor threat with no clear and imminent danger to ourselves. There is a continuum for anxiety. Anxiety can be used to keep us moving. There are two kinds of anxiety 'trait' and 'state'. 'Trait' anxiety has the tendency to show us that we have to respond to a variety of situations with more or less anxiety level. Some people seem always to be anxious while others stay calm. There is and are dispositional responses to anxiety. 'State' anxiety is a level of anxiety to a particular situation or time. An example of this is when high risk takers put themselves in dangerous situations and activities, as in risky sex practices, drug users, injurious persons and anti-social personality disorders. There are low levels of anxiety with high risk takers situations and when symptoms expressed are psychological and physiological as well culture determines from severe to low.
There are four types of anxiety
1. physiological or somatic symptoms like dizziness and sweaty palms, accelerated heartbeat, dry mouth and throat and even uncontrollable shaking and ringing in the ears. There is a feeling of 'being on edge'.
2. emotional symptoms like fearfulness and being on guard.
3. cognitive symptoms like being aware of unrealistic worries and things are worse than they really are and bad things will happen.
The behavioral symptoms are to avoid situations because of your fears. OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) shows a rigid and routine patterns or avoidance of said issue.
Generalized Anxiety Disorder is the disorder that is characterized by excessive anxiety and worry related to many different things in life. Anxiety shifts to one area to another. In Multiple/high risk trait anxiety the worries have difficulty in controlling the anxiety. There are chronic ongoing symptoms and will experience the following: restlessness, feeling on edge, have difficulty concentrating or 'going blank', irritability, fatigues easily, tense muscles and sleep disturbances. These will interfere in daily life, as in work, study, parenting duties. We will need to rule out if this anxiety is caused by a medical condition. This will become a vicious cycle going from anxiety to the stress to the distress going back and forth. 'What causes this?' We will not know but will try to pinpoint the cause of the anxiety.
There are theories as from Freud for we all know what he is famous for right. Freud and his psychoanalytic theory is when impulses are of the fear and do not know how to deal with the SELF (ID). If we get past Freud children have parents that are not warm and nurturing that creates an image that is one of vulnerability and others that have hostile approaches that lead to chronic anxiety in the self.
To be continued More on Anxiety disorders
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Assessment and Diagnosis
To continue with various questionnaires that one can use with various clients and patients. The next one on the list is the 'Children's Behavior Checklist' that has over 100 items for parents to rate their children. This is a personality inventory along with a few others that have tendencies to identify typical ways of responding behaviorally, cognitively, emotionally, show well-being. It also shows attitudes of the child. The MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-III) is widely used and is empirically based for this test can detect lies (a lie scale) which is highly standardized and not flexible. There are also projective tests that have ambiguous stimuli and may have no specific meaning give. There is no set way of interpretation. The person thinks of something and current feelings will be revealed in what is seen. You will tap into the unconscious. There are the famous Rorshach tests (the famous inkblots) that have many interpretations on what is seen. There could be a part or a whole picture presented on the inkblot, but they are still standardized. Another teat is the 'Thematic Apperception Test' which is a series of ambiguous pictures that tell a story. The theme is what is seen in the story pictures. Still another test is the 'Sentence Completion Test' that is a series of open-ended sentences to be completed by the client/patient. The pros to this test is that it helps the clients to see clues to identify issues and concerns but still not directly revealed. The cons is that is has poor validity and reliability for clinicians' bias so some scores are so vulnerable.
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Comments (1)
Interesting. What worked for me with anxiety was the 4x4 breathing. I learned from my mother to hold my breath when afraid, angry, stressed, and others. You can only hold your breath so long before you have anxiety or panic attacks. 😉 I haven't experienced an anxiety or panic attack since my 30s.