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Books in Anxiety disorders

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Anxiety

  • 1st Edition
  • October 22, 2013
  • Bozzano G Luisa
  • English
  • eBook
    9 7 8 - 1 - 4 8 3 2 - 8 8 5 8 - 1
This volume analyses the perplexing and often disabling form of distress known as anxiety from a psychological rather than a biomedical perspective, illustrating the rich contribution that psychological theory has made and is making to this topic.**The first section extensively examines the clinical literature, describing and delineating with case examples the cluster of characteristic features termed panic-anxiety. Research findings in other clinical areas such as alcohol dependence are shown to have conceptual and empirical links with panic-anxiety. The second section of the book reviews and evaluates the main theoretical approaches to anxiety, including specific models of panic and agoraphobia, challenging many traditional assumptions and advocating the analysis of anxiety as a socially constructed meaning imposed on experience rather than a theoretical concept or psychopathological state. The methodological implications are discussed and a schematic model of panic-anxiety is proposed.**The theoretical integration represents a major contribution to the resurgence of interest in this field and will be of relevance to all researchers and postgraduate students within the mental health professions.**FROM THE PREFACE: This book has two main objectives. The first is to describe a dimension of psychological distress I have called panic-anxiety. This takes up the first part of the book, which surveys literature that is primarily descriptive and psychiatric. The second objective is pursued in the second part of the book, in which I examine a large number of theories of anxiety to see what they might have to offer in explaining the panic-anxiety cluster of complaints. I am therefore concerned to apply psychological theory to a real-world problem, that is, to what people who seek professional help loosely describe as panic, anxiety and fears of public situations.**The theoretical and experimental literature on anxiety is so vast that I have had to be disciplined and in no small measure prejudiced in favour of a particular theoretical perspective. I have attempted as far as possible to treat anxiety as a lay construct, that is, as a social construction and not a scientific concept. For this reason, I have endeavoured to refer to reports of anxiety or to complaints of anxiety in order to avoid the common tendency to reify anxiety as a an entity which exists independently of the social origins of the term. Accordingly, I believe that the relevant question to ask is not, What is anxiety? but, What are the antecedents of reports (or complaints) of anxiety?**It is intended that this book should provide a coherent perspective on a common form of psychological distress, of value to therapists, researchers and students of abnormal psychology. In many ways, the problems for which people seek help do not define 'natural' areas of scientific research, and so it is difficult to combine theoretical and practical interests in one book. The complaints with which I am particularly concerned--panic and fears of public places--can be analysed to reveal scientific questions which have a significance much wider than the explanation of particular complaints made to professionals working in a clinical context. Apart from its obvious social significance, a clinical area is therefore simply a point of departure for scientific investigation. My intention, then, is to use this clinical area as an illustration of how such problems might be tackled from a theoretical perspective which is essentially psychological.**The theoretical position I have adopted owes much to the views of Sarbin (1964, 1968), Mandler (1975) and Averill (1980a,b). In taking anxiety to be a lay construct, I assume that the 'What is?' questions rightly belong to the sociology of knowledge. Of course, the applied psychologist also has substantive issues to consider. For example, How can this individual be helped to report calmness rather than anxiety? or, How can that individual be helped to travel freely on public transport? I suggest that the most positive contribution a social constructivist position has to offer is to dissuade researchers from regarding these real-life problems as reflecting an underlying emotion of anxiety, or, even less helpful, an anxiety disorder.**Biological and medical research on anxiety is also considered in this light. Reductive biological and pathological hypotheses are rejected, but an attempt is made to integrate the biological aspects at a higher level of analysis. For this reason, the book differs from others which tend to confine themselves to a description and explanation of postulated disorders or syndromes. Because the emphasis of this book is essentially conceptual, there is relatively little discussion of assessment and therapy, apart from a general critique of current approaches.**Most experiences described as fear or anxiety in an everyday context have an identifiable source or object. When these experiences are reported as unbearably intense or lead to the avoidance of various situations, they are generally referred to as phobias. In the past 20 years there has been a considerable advance in the technology of reducing and eliminating unwanted phobias. The new methods of imaginal and real-life confrontation are successful in the majority of cases when anxiety is reported in connection with specific eliciting stimuli. The same success cannot be claimed for methods of dealing with complaints of anxiety that appear to be unrelated to identifiable circumstances. In one form of these complaints, a person may suddenly feel overwhelmed by unpleasant sensations which are usually described as a panic attack. Panic and other complaints of anxiety which are perceived as irrational form the principal interest of this book. A second major concern is the problem of fears of public places, often referred to as agoraphobia. Typically, the person who complains of these fears is unable to leave the home unaccompanied, although travel by car, a 'safe' environment, is usually possible. Although agoraphobia is tied to situations, the fear is not reported to be about these situations but is usually expressed as a fear of experiencing a panic attack in these situations. As I will argue, fears of public situations appear to be associated with panic and complaints of anxiety of a nonspecific kind.**FROM THE FOREWORD: This book is a welcome addition to a growing literature that treats perplexing and sometimes disabling conduct from a psychological rather than a biomedical perspective. It is one of an increasing number of treatises that boldly assume that psychological events may be studied in their own right without reducing the phenomena to biological or mentalistic categories. Among other topics, Hallam critically reviews the clinical and experimental work on self-reported anxiety, panic and agoraphobia. He demonstrates with considerable force the disutility of the traditional practice of assigning such phenomena to a world of disordered minds.**Anxiety has been employed as a key concept in many psychoanalytic and psychological theories. Before its use as a theoretical construct, anxiety was a lay construct, a metaphor invented to communicate about vaguely perceived and poorly understood sensory experience. This lay construct, or metaphor, was metonymically transformed by certain theorists seeking a universal intervening variable to account for puzzling conduct. That is to say, the theorists transfigured anxiety to a cause from its original use as a metaphor for effects of interpersonal actions and physiological responses. As a staple of biomedical research and practice, anxiety is a reified metaphor. One of the results of the uncritical use of the reified metaphor was the creation of such unproductive diagnostic categories as anxiety neurosis, anxiety hysteria and anxiety state. Hallam's review of research and practice makes abundantly clear that this metaphor-to-myth transformation has little utility, either as a heuristic for research or as a model for therapy.**Many lessons are to be learned from this book, not the least of which is the demonstration that the lay construct, anxiety, is multireferential. When a clinician asks a client for referents for such complaints as, 'I am anxious' (or 'panicky' or 'agoraphobic'), the client's response is drawn from a limitless pool of vague and ambiguous descriptors. Examples of the interpretations offered by clients include such diverse referents as 'I had the feeling I was about to die', 'I was suffocating, gasping for air', 'My legs became rubbery', 'I was about to faint', 'My brain was racing ahead of my thought', and so on.**From Hallam's detailed analysis of the multireferential nature of anxiety complaints, one could formulate the following rule for praxis: When a client employs 'anxiety' or a similar descriptor in his or her self-report, regard it as metaphoric utterance, not as a statement that demands causal analysis. The metaphoric utterance, that is, the complaint, is a social construction whose building blocks include the client's beliefs, linguistic skills, purposes and concurrent existential or identity problems.**Another lesson to be learned from this book is the continuity of anxiety complaints as reported in clinical settings with those of persons who do not come to the attention of professional helpers. Such continuity is an argument against the identification of anxiety complaints as a psychiatric disorder. For example, the fear of strange places may be universal and not restricted to a clinical population if the definition of strange places is broad enough.**The author holds that the client, like the rest of us, constructs his or her world from perceptions, beliefs, imaginings and rememberings. Thus anxiety is a construction, and it is communicated to others (and to the self) with the aid of metaphoric and metonymic translations. This constructivist view is fast displacing the entrenched biomedical view that treats human beings as passive reactors to stimuli according to still-to-be discovered mechanistic laws. Metaphors drawn from physics, geology and technology, so tightly woven into the texture of the mechanistic world view, have lost the power to stimulate meaningful research and theory about the complexities of human action. As a result, social scientists are turning to humanistic disciplines for their working metaphors, among them, game playing, narrative, drama and rhetoric.**The use of such descriptive metaphors reflects a world view that is in sharp contrast to the mechanistic world view that has dominated scientific thought, including that of psychology and psychiatry, for so long. Contextualism is the name assigned to this alternative world view, and its root metaphor is the historical act. Among other things, this root metaphor entails that the actors who participate in the creation of historical acts are agents. They engage in intentional actions not only to solve problems of a practical nature, but also to maintain or enhance their identities. Toward this end, they construct their worlds. Some constructions provide the backdrop for personal drama, one outcome of which may be the self-report of anxiety. Another element of the contextualist metaphysic is that change and novelty, rather than invariance, are to be expected.**Hallam's critical review of the scientific literature on anxiety and emotion supports the conclusion that the failure of modern science to formulate a general theory of anxiety is traceable to the slavish (and often unrecognized) adherence to the biomedical model. The users of this model seek causality within the organism, either in the somatic networks or in the assumed mind-space. It is not an inappropriate strategy, given their stance that the objects of their attention are regarded as passive, not as active agents. The supporters of the biomedical model have failed to achieve a consistently workable theory as a basis for therapy because human beings are, in fact, agents. Thus, a clinican who reads this book and elects to apply its wisdom would not address a person's complaint of anxiety with the question, What is the cause of the anxiety? but rather with questions of this sort: What are the antecedent and concurrent interpersonal conditions that influence a person as agent to turn his or her attention to vaguely defined internal events, to choose the sick role or to describe perplexing happenings with particular metaphors or metonymies? What are his or her concerns about death and dying, being abandoned or loss of face? What are the person's power relations and how does the sick role influence his or her relative power? How does the person's self-narrative fit into the self-narratives of significant others?**In my own experience, I have found it useful to look upon complaints of anxiety as a form of attention deployment, not unlike the attention deployment of the classical hypochondriac. The broad focus on bodily symptoms, besides providing the basis for adopting the sick role, effectively supports efforts in the context of significant social relationships not to spell out certain imagined or perceived flaws in one's character. The question that guides the search for understanding is, What are the client's reasons for turning attention to complaints of anxiety? In this respect, the clinician might entertain the hypothesis of self-deception and its implications for discovering and formulating reasons for the client's attention deployment to events described as anxiety.**The foregoing remarks are but a sample of the clinical and theoretical notions generated in my reading of Hallam's treatise. A bountiful harvest of insights awaits both the practicing clinician and the laboratory scientist engaged in solving the mystery of anxiety. The rich yield is due in no small measure to the author's ability simultaneously to reflect his experience as clinician and as scientist. As clinician*b1scientist, he illuminates many puzzling observations and opens the way for a better understanding of human problems.

Social Anxiety

  • 2nd Edition
  • September 22, 2010
  • Patricia M. DiBartolo + 1 more
  • English
  • eBook
    9 7 8 - 0 - 1 2 - 3 7 8 5 5 2 - 7
Social Anxiety Clinical, Developmental, and Social Perspectives, Second Edition, provides an interdisciplinary approach to understanding social anxiety disorder (SAD) by bringing together research across several disciplines, including social psychology, developmental psychology, behavior genetics, and clinical psychology. The book explains the different aspects of social anxiety and social phobia in adults and children, including the evolution of terminology and constructs, assessment procedures, relationship to personality disorders, and psychopathology. It considers most prominent theoretical perspectives on social anxiety and SAD discussed by social psychologists, developmental psychologists, behavior geneticists, clinical psychologists, and psychiatrists. These theoretical perspectives emphasize different factors that can contribute to the etiology and/or maintenance of social anxiety/SAD. Treatment approaches are also discussed, such as cognitive behavioral therapy, exposure intervention, social skills training. The contents of this volume represent some of the best views and thoughts in the field. It is hoped that the breadth of perspectives offered will help foster continued interdisciplinary dialogue and efforts toward cross-fertilization to advance the understanding, conceptualization, and treatment of chronic and debilitating social anxiety.

Stress Consequences

  • 1st Edition
  • September 28, 2009
  • George Fink
  • English
  • Hardback
    9 7 8 - 0 - 1 2 - 3 7 5 1 7 4 - 4
  • eBook
    9 7 8 - 0 - 1 2 - 3 7 5 1 7 5 - 1
Stress is a universal phenomenon that impacts adversely on most people. This volume provides a readily accessible compendium that focuses on the physical and psychological consequences of stress for individuals and society. Clinical attention focuses on disorders of the stress control system (e.g. Cushing’s Syndrome: Addison’s Disease) and the adverse impact of stress on human physical and mental health. Detailed reviews address disorders such as PTSD, anxiety, major depression, psychoses and related disorders such as combat fatigue and burnout. The work covers interactions between stress and neurodegenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease, as well as stress-immune-inflammatory interactions in relation to cancer and autoimmune and viral diseases. Emphasis is also placed on the role of stress in obesity, hypertension, diabetes type II and other features of the metabolic syndrome which has now reached epidemic proportions in the USA and other countries.

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder

  • 1st Edition
  • May 20, 2009
  • Julian D. Ford
  • English
  • eBook
    9 7 8 - 0 - 0 8 - 0 9 2 2 5 6 - 0
This authored text-reference will be the first comprehensive text in the rapidly growing field of psychological trauma and posttraumatic stress disorder.According to the NIMH, approximately 5.2 million American adults already suffer from post traumatic stress disorder. Caused by everything from combat experience to violent personal assaults to natural disasters and accidents, the incidence of PTSD has already reached epidemic proportions. The profound impact of psychological trauma and the need for proactive and scientifically-based approaches to timely prevention and evidence based treatment is unarguable and mental health programs are seeing a significant rise in the number of PTSD courses offered and services required. As a result, scholars, researchers, educators, clinicians, and trainees in the health care and human and social services need a concise and comprehensive source of authoritative information on psychological trauma and posttraumatic stress. This volume will offer a foundational understanding of the field as well cover key controversies, the influence of culture and gender, and describe state-of-the-art research and clinical methodologies in down-to-earth terms. Clinical case studies will be used liberally.

Clinical Psychology

  • 1st Edition
  • September 2, 2008
  • David C.S. Richard + 1 more
  • English
  • Hardback
    9 7 8 - 0 - 1 2 - 3 7 4 2 5 6 - 8
  • eBook
    9 7 8 - 0 - 0 8 - 0 9 2 1 4 1 - 9
Clinical Psychology is a graduate-level introduction to the field of clinical psychology. While most textbooks focus on either assessment, treatment, or research, this textbook covers all three together specifically for the introductory level graduate course. Chapter coverage is diverse and contributors come from both PhD and PsyD programs and a variety of theoretical orientations. Chapter topics cover the major activities of the contemporary clinical psychologist with an introduction focusing on training models. The book has a mentoring style designed to highlight the relevance of the topics discussed to clinicians in training. Assessment and treatment chapters focus on evidence-based practice, comparing and contrasting different options, the basis for clinical choice between them, and efficacy of same. It will also introduce the business and ethical aspects of the clinical career that current introductory books do not include, such ethics in assessment, treatment, and research; third party payers; technological developments; dissemination of research findings; cross-cultural issues; and the future of the profession. The text is designed for students in their first year of clinical psychology graduate training.

Risk Factors in Depression

  • 1st Edition
  • July 31, 2008
  • Keith S. Dobson + 1 more
  • English
  • eBook
    9 7 8 - 0 - 0 8 - 0 5 6 0 5 6 - 4
Depression is one of the most common mental health disorders, affecting 14% of all people at some point in their lifetime. Women are twice as likely to become depressed as men, but beyond gender there are a variety of risk factors that influence the prevalence and likelihood of experiencing depression. Risk Factors in Depression consolidates research findings on risk factors into one source, for ease of reference for both researchers and clinicians in practice. The book divides risk factors into biological, cognitive, and social risk factors. This provides researchers with the opportunity to examine the interface among different theoretical perspectives and variables, and to look for the opportunity for more complex and explanatory models of depression.

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: Subtypes and Spectrum Conditions

  • 1st Edition
  • July 10, 2007
  • Jonathan S Abramowitz + 2 more
  • English
  • eBook
    9 7 8 - 0 - 0 8 - 0 5 5 0 4 9 - 7
Researchers and clinicians working with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders (OCD) and related disorders who need the most current information available will find this volume of great use. Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: Subtypes and Spectrum Conditions covers contemporary theory, research, and treatment of the various subtypes of OCD and problems often referred to as OCD spectrum disorders. As the mental health field considers the next iteration of the DSM, an entire research agenda is being planned to elucidate issues such as how best to understand and classify OCD. The questions of subtypes and spectrum disorders are at the heart of this issue and will guide how OCD is conceptualized in DSM-V. This volume, dedicated to such diagnostic, theoretical, and treatment issues, helps informs the field of the most up-to-date knowledge and what remains to be resolved.

Normal and Abnormal Fear and Anxiety in Children and Adolescents

  • 1st Edition
  • June 29, 2007
  • Peter Muris
  • S. J. Rachman
  • English
  • eBook
    9 7 8 - 0 - 0 8 - 0 5 4 5 3 6 - 3
Written at a post-graduate level, this new volume provides a cumulative overview of the research available on the pathogenesis of fear and anxiety in youths. Its aim is to give the reader an idea of the factors that are thought to be involved in the development of abnormal fear and anxiety in children and adolescents, and to integrate this knowledge in a comprehensive model. Normal and Abnormal Fear and Anxiety in Children and Adolescents also gives an update of the current scientific status on the psychological and pharmacological treatment and assessment of anxiety disorders in youths.

Stress and Addiction

  • 1st Edition
  • December 22, 2006
  • Mustafa al'Absi
  • English
  • eBook
    9 7 8 - 0 - 0 8 - 0 5 2 5 2 9 - 7
Stress is one of the most commonly reported precipitants of drug use and is considered the number one cause of relapse to drug abuse. For the past several decades, there have been a number of significant advances in research focusing on the neurobiological and psychosocial aspects of stress and addiction; along with this growth came the recognition of the importance of understanding the interaction of biological and psychosocial factors that influence risk for initiation and maintenance of addictive behaviors. Recent research has started to specifically focus on understanding the nature of how stress contributes to addiction - this research has influenced the way we think about addiction and its etiological factors and has produced exciting possibilities for developing effective intervention strategies; to date there has been no available book to integrate this literature. This highly focused work integrates and consolidates available knowledge to provide a resource for researchers and practitioners and for trainees in multiple fields. Stress and Addiction will help neuroscientists, social scientists, and mental health providers in addressing the role of stress in addictive behaviors; the volume is also useful as a reference book for those conducting research in this field.