Focus on Brain Disorders - Anxiety Disorders - Introduction. Anxiety disorders are a group of syndromes (see Table 1) characterised by symptoms of excessive worrying, intense fears, hypervigilance and/or somatic symptoms, in the absence of a dangerous situation.
Anxiety disorders are the most common of all the psychiatric disorders (Robins et al, 1984), and recent cross-country studies indicate that they are highly prevalent. In addition, two anxiety disorders are among the four most common medical illnesses in the USA; The other two medical illnesses are also closely associated with anxiety. Of the psychiatric disorders, phobias are the most common, followed by depression, substance abuse and OCD (Karno et al, 1988). Pharmaco-economic research suggests that one-third of all costs related to mental illness are incurred because of anxiety disorders (Dupont et al, 1997), and the economic burden of disorders such as SAnD (Schneier et al, 1992b) and OCD (Hollander, 1997; Dupont et al, 1995) is extremely high.
Video. Seduction. Photographic Memory. MindMap.