Generalized anxiety disorder. Chronic excessive worry about real life events. Okay, it’s not like a phobia where somebody is worried about … they see a praying mantis and they kind of freak out. This is like, “I’m worried about my job, my finances, my health, my parents health, my husband’s health.” It’s what we all do but they do it so much and so often that they really need a psychiatrist because it’s really getting out of hand. Health care mall
Agoraphobia is not a specific phobia. A specific phobia is a thing that isn’t a social situation. It has nothing to do with people. If it’s people it’s a social phobia. Specific phobia is airplanes, blood, bats, trains, tunnels, thunder, dark, water. It’s things like that. Spiders, snakes, insects. Agoraphobia is … now if agoraphobia wasn’t associated with panic disorder they might have thrown it in there but agoraphobia, literally speaking, is fear of open places. But in reality it plays out as fear of going outside your home and mixing in the world. Sometimes you can see it without panic attacks, but really classically, and I think for the Boards, it’s very associated with panic disorder. The agoraphobia usually goes hand-in-hand with panic, because it’s secondary to the panic, classically at least.
Free floating anxiety: I’m nervous and I don’t know why. I’m feeling anxious and I don’t know what I’m anxious about. “What are you worried about?” “I don’t know.” One of the things to screen for is first of all, if it’s panic or not panic. That’s definitely an important thing. If there’s no panic attacks – in other words they are not having the tachycardia and palpitations – just “I’m feeling nervous and I don’t know why.” You definitely want to do a medical workup and make sure they don’t have thyroid or something weird like carcinoid or pheochromocytoma. A lot of people come in with this free floating anxiety and what you do is send them to the psychiatrist and the psychiatrist puts them on Prozac, starts them in therapy, has trouble coming up with a diagnosis, and then maybe it gets better and maybe it doesn’t. That was back in the old days with the Freudian cartoons where the guy comes in and sits on the couch once a week and talks about his childhood. That was supposedly what that was supposed to treat, that sort of free floating anxiety. But it doesn’t really have a neat name anymore.
Recent Comments