Diagnosis and treatment of generalized anxiety
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Introduction
A person may tend to worry about everyday life events naturally without any obvious reasons. This feeling may be excessive and even exaggerated causing depression as such individuals always expect nothing better than a disaster and health, money, family, work or the school form basis of their thoughts. Anxiety is, therefore, a sense of fear and tense with unpleasant physical symptoms. When the symptoms go long for more days in excess, it can be considered a disorder and is referred to as generalized anxiety. Generalized anxiety can be accompanied by fever, faster heart rate, palpitation, headache among other symptoms.
These physical symptoms are initiated by the brain, which sends pulses through the nerves to other parts of the body making them function abnormally. The worry in people suffering from the disorder is often unrealistic and is capable of dominating a person’s mind thus affecting daily functioning and a person’s general activities.
Generalized Anxiety
In stressful situations, anxiety is considered normal as in most cases, someone may be anxious when in a threat situation which will activate adrenaline and nerve impulses necessary for in response to the stressful situations. The victim may decide for a 'fight or flight' response. Generalized anxiety is commonly characterized as a disorder and referred to as generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). Some of the symptoms of GAD appear and disappear with a common characteristic of worry and fearfulness and may last longer.
Generalized anxiety generally arises over small things, and mostly people do not understand why they are anxious over the little things. It might be quiet complex to establish the severity of anxiety in a person if that person has an anxious personality or generalized anxiety. The symptoms of the situation may influence a person’s schedule and the daily activities. A person will continuously feel restless, tiresome; have minimal concentration and insomnia, where one finds it difficult to get off to sleep. Such people also experience swayed mind and get irritated fast. A person does not experience generalized anxiety if the anxiety is about a particular thing.
Contributing Factors
Anxiety is common in older people but can be first observed at the early 20’s. It is also said it affects more women than men at a double rate and can be established I 1 out of every 50 people at one stage in life. Various factors may play a part in the development of anxiety, but its primary cause is not clearly known (Bulimia, 2013). The biological makeup and inherited factors in a person contribute to stress as they control different aspects of the body. Family history in relation to GAD is said to increase the likelihood of developing GAD, and, therefore, the tendency may be passed on over generations. Childhood experience such as abuse and trauma are also likely to help to a greater deal in trauma at the later stages of life or make one prone to anxiety.
Common stresses in life may also trigger the condition into being even if the cause terminates, the symptoms may persist due to minor factors. People with mental conditions are said to be likely to suffer from GAD, as the condition have been associated with the abnormal functioning of the brain. It is said that brain chemistry, involving nerve pathways connected to the parts of the brain involved in thinking and emotions contribute to the disorder if not well functioning.
Establishing General Anxiety
General anxiety can only be declared if the perceived symptoms persist in an individual for at least a month. The practitioner will begin by establishing the history of the client and perform physical tests to identify physical illness that may cause the symptoms. It may not be easy to tell if someone suffers from these. The intensity and duration of the symptoms, therefore, will assist the physician in the diagnosis, to establish if the symptoms and the extent of dysfunction indicate the presence of an anxiety disorder.
Physical problems that may cause physical anxiety can be confused with anxiety. Such conditions may need to be ruled out when establishing general anxiety disorder. GAD does not bring abnormality in a person’s life, and the victim can lead a perfectly normal life. In others, it may come and go while, in others, it can just get normal. The rise in the causative factors will likely worsen the condition with significant life stresses.
Treating Anxiety
Several tools can be developed to manage and treat General anxiety disorder. Such mechanisms are both therapeutic and medicinal and are discussed here.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Cognitive behavioral therapy is considered the most effective form of treatment for GAD as explained in CBT (2011). This treatment is said to have been effective in over half number of people with GAD in reducing the symptoms and improving quality of lives. This procedure is based on the notion that certain ways of thinking are capable of initiating particular mental health problems in a person.
A person with GAD need to understand own patterns of thought and classify them as best or harmful. Under this therapy, a professional therapist undertakes the process. The client’s way of thinking then needs to change through own decision and efforts to cast out dangerous ideas and thoughts, and gain more realistic patterns of thinking. This process takes roughly an hour and normally conducted weekly for the client for several weeks with other sessions allocated to be taken at home. The take home therapies should be monitored too.
Through the behavioral therapy, a person is capable of replacing harmful behaviors with those that are helpful and not harmful. Keen interest should be placed on the actual cause of anxiety and then the focus on it in order to turn it off and make it less dangerous. Therapist for a client may adopt several techniques with anxiety depending on their condition and circumstances. This therapy is a mixture of cognitive and behavioral therapy in dealing with the change process for a client in current thoughts and actions other than focusing on the events of the past.
Counseling
Counseling focuses on problem-solving or solution-seeking techniques that would help a client come out of the current situation and elevate to a better situation. This method is employed in order to aid a client come out of anxiety and form another class of opinion that is effective
Anxiety management courses
Anxiety management course may be effective if the services are availed for an individual. Group course may be preferred by some individuals rather than individual therapy or counseling. The course mostly covers learning how to relax, problem-solving skills and coping strategies.
Self-help
This procedure a person develops on methods of combating stress with the help of a professional or media. The clients here mostly uses the prints to learn simple deep-breathing techniques and other measures that help them relieve stress and relax in order to ease anxiety symptoms. Other media such as electronic and visual documents are also available and can be used by such people (Ingles, 2009)
Medication
There are several medications available for use depending on a physician’s prescription and the condition of the client diagnosed.
Antidepressant medicines
Antidepressants are commonly used in both treating preventive purposes in order to eliminate or treat the symptoms and even to reduce those symptoms even if someone is not suffering from anxiety. Clinical trials have so far established that antidepressants can ease symptoms in most cases where they are observable in persons. Such drugs are able to influence neurotransmitters such as serotonin that may be responsible for causing anxiety symptoms in order to reverse their role in causing the symptoms.
Antidepressants may work for long (up to four weeks) before their effect build up in a person. The drug does not bring the effect instantly, therefore, a person need to continue the medication for the period prescribed without stopping, even if you notice changes earlier or not. This drug requires time to work and its effect felt. These drugs are not addictive as the case of tranquillizers, and their side effect differ depending on the genre taken. There are several drugs that have been found to be helpful in dealing with anxiety, and which have been licensed for use across states and countries. Some people’s symptoms may worsen off for a period before starting to note an improvement in the period of taking these drugs.
Tranquillizers
The most commonly prescribed drugs for anxiety are benzodiazepines, but this may differ across countries depending on the response or side effect. A good example of benzodiazepines is diazepam, which is commonly used as they are said to work well usually to ease the symptoms. Tranquillizers as mentioned earlier are addictive and can lose their effect if taken more than the recommended. They are also capable of making one drowsy and therefore, they are not used much now for persistent anxiety conditions such as GAD.
Conclusion
Many people suffering from this disorder cannot be completely cured as symptoms re-appear from time to time. Proper treatment of the symptoms however can be or help them gain substantial relief. This disorder cannot also be prevented, but there are precautions that may help lessen the effects of the symptoms, reduce them or completely control them. Actions such as reduced intake of caffeine, daily exercise and a balanced diet can play a part in reducing the symptoms.
Generalized anxiety is not comparable to the day-to-day stresses people undergo in life. For it to be declared a disorder, the symptoms must have lasted in a person for a prolonged period, usually, one month. It is commonly characterized with prolonged exaggerated worry and tension with no reasonable cause and no actual symptom. This condition scuttles a person’s concentration and makes that person feel unreasonable tiredness, and much depressed too.
Impairment associated with generalized anxiety is normally considered mild, with the people suffering from the condition not restricting themselves from social places or job settings. Unlike other disorders, such people do not avoid certain situations because of the disorder. GAD however is able to deformalize daily activities of a person and influence behavior and relationships. This disorder is said to develop gradually from childhood and adolescent with the ability to onset at later ages too. Women are also prone to the disorder than the men and are commonly diagnosed after a period of exaggerated depression and worries without any concrete reason about a number of events with a difficulty in controlling the situation.