Anxiety refers to a state of severe fear, uncertainty, and apprehension resulting from the expectation of a threatening situation or event, frequent to a level of that normal psychological and physical functioning is interfered with. All anxiety conditions are said to share anxiety and fear symptoms. The Physiological symptoms of anxiety disorder include breath shortness, muscle tension, dizziness, heart palpitations, and sweating. The emotional symptoms for the anxiety disorder include fear for something extremely dreadful taking place, restlessness, fear of humiliation or embarrassment, a sense of imminent doom, or fear of dying (APA, 2013).
Anxiety disorder is a common condition in the society. According to statistics, the United States about 18% of the total population which accounts for about 40 million adults experiences impact of anxiety disorders annually. Anxiety disorders contain a lifetime occurrence of about 30%. According to Kessler et al. (2005), about 50% of all people identified to have anxiety disorder in addition to meeting the depressive disorder criteria (Beekman, 2013). Anxiety disorder is normally initiated by different situations or things. This results to different classification of anxiety disorder based on the actual aspect that initiates the condition. Thus the different types of anxiety disorders include separation anxiety disorder caused by separation, selective mutism, anxiety specific phobia caused by different things include darkness and height among others, social anxiety disorder, panic disorder, general anxiety disorder, substance initiated anxiety disorder, and medical condition initiated anxiety disorder (APA, 2013). Among the social anxiety disorder and panic attacks are the kind of anxiety disorders with the highest level of prevalence the two have a prevalence level of 10 and 11.2% respectively. The rest have a prevalence rate of less than 10%. It is essential for counselor to realize that acute anxiety is a suicide risk factor. Moreover anxiety disorders are highly found in youth with 11 years being the media onset age (Sood et al., 2012).
Empirically Supported Treatment Strategies For Anxiety Disorder
Although there are various forms of anxiety disorder treatments available, the best and evidence based anxiety disorder treatment is cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). CBT is a form of psychotherapy which teaches individuals various ways of reacting, behaving, and thinking about fearful and anxiety-producing situations. CBT can assist people practice and learn social skills that are important for handling social anxiety disorder. The two unique stand-alone CBT components used to handle social anxiety disorder include exposure therapy and cognitive therapy (Bystritsky et al., 2013). CBT has empirically been proved to be effective in treating most of the anxiety disorders. The CBT therapy when effectively done has proved to show positive outcome after its application for a while based on individual case. However, when the situation is severe, it may need to be used with a combination of pharmacology or other therapeutic methods (Otto, 2011).
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