Treating Anxiety Disorder: Medication Vs. Therapy
An anxiety disorder is a very troublesome mental illness because it is very distressing and can impact a person’s normal behavior and coping ability in day-to-day situations. It has the potential of completely changing a person’s life and strips him of opportunities and chances for career advancement and in developing healthy social relationships. It also severely limits his perception of his surroundings and keeps him living in unhealthy fear and worry.
How anxiety disorder is diagnosed
A physician will obtain a personal and medical history of the patient. Unlike most physiological or medical conditions, anxiety disorder cannot be diagnosed using blood tests, blood pressure and other physical examinations. It can be determined using a thorough interview where a doctor asks the patient several questions pertaining about his condition. Medical conditions or the possibility of substance abuse should be ruled out first before the presence of an anxiety disorder is considered.
The purpose of a diagnosis is also to come up with a list of the specific criteria associated with different types of anxiety disorders. This is very important to establish because it determines what type of medications and/or therapies can work best. Failure to properly diagnose the specific anxiety disorder a person has can cause some significant problems.
There is no such thing as a ‘cure’ for anxiety disorder because its cause is not physiological. However, there are treatments that help in managing the illness and taking care of its symptoms. It is absolutely necessary that treatment for anxiety disorder be administered as early as possible. If not, the illness can become chronic and more difficult to treat. In fact, some anxiety disorder in advance stages can be resistant to treatment.
There are several methods used in the treatment of anxiety disorder and they can be grouped into two major categories: therapy and medications.
The use of therapy in treating anxiety disorder
Depending on the specific type of anxiety disorder a person suffers from, different therapies may be used. Cognitive behavioral therapy, also known as CBT, is one of the most common treatment methods used in anxiety disorders. The basis of CBT is in the connection of behavior symptomatic to the disorder that is associated with and caused by a pattern of thoughts and beliefs.
For example, a person with agoraphobia might think, “The train’s doors are closed and locked. I can’t breathe. I’m going to die in this train.” Such negative thoughts, which usually have no actual basis, can in turn trigger negative thoughts that produce negative behavior. By teaching a patient to handle his apparent fear with training, reality testing, cognitive challenging and restructuring, he can actually manage his fear and later on, totally eliminate it even when faced with a similar situation.
Behavior therapy, on the other hand, uses exposure to promote desensitization of an individual. By training an individual to control his thoughts and redefine what he believes are dangerous and scary, he is able to control or manage his fears. He might also combine behavior therapy with relaxation techniques including controlled breathing to help him manage his anxiety.
The use of medications in treating anxiety disorder
Again, there is no absolute cure for anxiety disorder and even when medications are prescribed, they will not address the mental illness itself. Instead, they will help an individual cope with the physical symptoms that anxiety disorder causes. Common medications include anti-depressants (like imipramine and benzodiazepine) and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors or SSRIs (like fluoxetine, paroxetine and sertraline). Prozac and Zoloft are some of the brand names of these drugs.
Since these are drugs, expect some benefits and risks. A doctor will be able to explain what the advantages are and the side effects of different drug treatments if there are any. It is important to understand that medications should be treated as short-term courses of treatment only and should not be considered as the only and ultimate solution to the disorder.
Medication vs. Therapy
Anxiety disorder is a psychiatric illness and involves the mental functioning of an individual. To treat the behavior that results from this disorder, psychotherapy is the foremost and most natural choice.
Medications are only used to treat physical manifestations of the illness. For example, drugs may be taken to help relax the muscles and prevent feelings of tension or to bring down the heart beat to a normal rate. Medications are prescribed to address physical problems for the short term. They are never used alone and are instead prescribed in combination with therapy to produce an effective long-term treatment.
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