Anxiety Lahey Anxiety, Mood and Delusional Disorders

Anxiety Lahey

Anxiety, Mood and Delusional Disorders

Stress and anxiety related disorders are often derived of a complex set of overlapping symptoms and conditions. Anxiety disorders will frequently be encompassed by mood or personality related disorders and can collectively render a debilitating set of effect for the subject. The incapacity to control stress, to limit the physiological or emotional panic produced by stressful situations or to go about one's daily life with functional normalcy are all factors which can magnify and intensify an already imposing condition. However, the importance of diagnosing and managing an anxiety-related disorder transcends even the dense symptomology of these conditions. Indeed, as our research has shown, there is not only a high level of comorbidity where anxiety disorders and other more advanced psychological dysfunctions are concerned, but that a failure to reign in the conditions and symptoms of a stress disorder can actually lead directly to the emergence of yet more severe pathologies such as mood and personality disorders. (Hersen et al., p. 350) Indeed, research even reveals a connection between stress disorder or anxiety disorder and psychopathology such as may be manifested in a delusional disorder. The discussion is prompted by the consideration that the comorbidity between these conditions is recognized as being high but that there may be a greater need to elucidate the ways that low stress management correlates to a higher vulnerability of developing a psychopathological condition.

Those suffering from anxieties pertaining, for example, to combat-related Post Traumatic Stress Disorders or those who have developed panic disorders based on some long-standing cognitive dissonance produced by a traumatic incident may be said to have manifested 'normal' psychic wounds in relation to these experiences. Here, "in contrast to 'ordinary' stressful experiences, traumatic or catastrophic events are linked etiologically in the DSM to a specific syndrome -- PTSD. The disorder's criterion symptoms are defined in terms of their connection, in time and content, with a distinct traumatic event." (Breslau, 923) Implied in this definition is the argument that dramatic and extraordinary negative experiences will result in the very normal response of mental distress, even producing symptoms of disorder. These distinctions do impose a challenge on mental health professionals who encounter some intercession of multiple conditions.

There is a recognition in the field of psychology that 'normal' responses to traumatic experiences can ultimately lead to more clinically abnormal behavior, especially if left untreated. As the Geyer (2001) text indicates, Normal Psychology "provides a framework for understanding when and how things become less than normal for individuals and providing suggestions or solutions in that context." (Geyer, 1) This is to say that in many ways, the very purpose of abnormal psychology is distinguish at which point individual differences manifest as something deviant, destructive or pathological in the life of the subject. With respect to the gradual transition from unmanaged anxiety disorder or mood disorder, to something more severe, the untreated subject may lapse into a delusional state where, according to the DSM-IV, one persists in maintaining patently false beliefs in spite of clear and concrete evidence suggesting a different reality from these beliefs. (Chopra, p. 1)