Psychiatric Disorders/Anxiety disorders/Generalized Anxiety Disorder

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Introduction[edit | edit source]

Generalized Anxiety Disorder is a psychological condition that either chronically, periodically or temporally effects the attitude, mood, thoughts, and disposition of a victim's thoughts and emotions. This condition can go on all throughout the day and the person can worry about various minuscule tasks to future events that should normally cause no significant alarm or stress, or everyday nonsense that gets overstimulated by hyperactive brain chemicals or other means. GAD (Generalized anxiety disorder) for short, appears to effect women up to two thirds more than it does males in some studies. This condition can be accompanied by several other disorders in some cases, but in it's soul sense, most cases that are truly GAD are predominantly purely psychological and have no physical effects. There are numerous symptoms that can be associated with someone who has or claims to have GAD. These factors vary widely from social phobias to full blown panic attacks. GAD seems to be a hard condition to diagnose and a hard condition to treat. Many people who have been diagnosed with GAD can have much more serious underlying psychological disorders. While being hard to diagnose, doctors try to treat most anxiety born disorders in a similar way, the best coarse or treatment in this age for GAD seems to be with a synergistic effect, attributing from both pharmaceuticals and psychotherapy.

Symptoms[edit | edit source]

Because this disorder can be so fluid, symptoms of this condition can change like air currents or stay concrete after significant occurrences or sudden recollections of past events. Chronic pain in parts of the torso, chest, back, and shoulders can occur. Feelings of sorrow, guilt, depression, stress, panic, and even hyperventilation can occur. These feelings can stem off of small issues. To the outside observer it can seem as though they happened without a discernible trigger. This can have a spiderweb effect on emotions that can rapidly get worse if provoked the right way. Symptoms of GAD can be very severe and cause induced emotional, physical, and psychological side effects. Mainly people that show severe GAD symptoms are thought to be either bipolar, depressed, ADD, ADHD, or sometimes even schizophrenic. Various worrying can occur about mundane elements. People with GAD can even lash out violently at others if small things don't go as planned.

Diagnosis[edit | edit source]

Diagnosis is the trickiest part of GAD. It can bend it's framework to fit most any archetype that is a similar mental disorder. Patients that enter doctors offices with GAD symptoms rarely go in thinking they have it, unless they are there in hope of scoring drugs. The patients will complain about this and that, pain in my chest after an argument, or my kids won't ever settle down. In some cases doing a specific action can induce stressful or otherwise cause anxiety like condition. High stress jobs, pointless arguments with loved ones, preparing for future events, or using drugs can induce panic attacks or more commonly just severe stress in patients. These events are normal to the general public but the victim's brain tends to view them as significant and pump adrenaline or other stimulants, mood modifyiers into the brain and CNS causing unneeded and unknown worry or stress.