...Agoraphobia as defined by the APA Dictionary of Psychology is literally the fear of the market place. Agoraphobia is manifested as anxiety about being in places or situations, fearing one may have panic symptoms or a panic attack, throwing up or having diarrhea in public. Those with agoraphobia live with the terror that they may become trapped, desperately avoiding situations where they feel that they would not be able to escape quickly or that may not be able to get help if they need it.κ Those with agoraphobia have a hard time feeling safe in public places, and most especially where crowds gather. Common areas that most people suffering from agoraphobia dread are elevators, sporting events, bridges, lines, driving, public transportation, malls and airplanes. In the more serious cases of agoraphobia, one’s fears become so intense that they are just trapped in their own homes because that is the only place they truly feel safe.λ Unlike most phobias and fears, Agoraphobia usually begins between late adolescence and the mid-30s. This phobia is often passed along in families. It can also occur if a person grows up with an overprotective parent or a parent that is a perfectionist. According to the Mayo Clinic, between 1 and 5 percent of people in the United States develop agoraphobia in their lifetime. Nearly 80% of those suffering from this phobia are women.μ Something familiar to all of us is anxiety at its minor symptom level. This often seems to weigh against...
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...Research paper on Anxiety Disorder Jeffrey S. Fletcher, M.A. Kathleen B. Stinger Psychopathology and Counseling, Coun 656 4, May 2014 Author Note Jeffrey S. Fletcher, Student, Liberty University. Correspondence concerning this paper should be addressed to Jeffrey S. Fletcher, Jfletcher1@liberty.edu Abstract This research paper is designed to review articles and books of professional journals in anxiety disorders, definition of anxiety disorder, review of current and past treatments of anxiety disorders, the new section and changes to anxiety disorder in the DSM-5, new treatments for anxiety disorders and medications for anxiety disorders. This paper will show spiritual considerations for treating anxiety disorders and how religion can improve one’s condition. It will show how CBT treatment of anxiety disorders have not been very successful and how medication has its limitations in treatment of anxiety disorders. This paper will also show what this clinician has learned and will take forward into the daily practice of treating adolescents with anxiety disorders. Keywords: anxiety, anxiety disorders, DSM-5, treatment Introduction When we talk about anxiety we have to distinguish between healthy anxiety or normal anxiety and anxiety disorders. It is normal to have a certain amount of anxiety for instance when one is in danger it is normal to become anxious. To have an anxiety disorder your anxiety would have to interfere with your life in a negative way. Anxiety...
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...Part I As of this date, the best evidenced-based treatment for treating panic disorder, with or without agoraphobia, appears to be a combination of cognitive behavioral therapy and pharmacotherapy. There are numerous studies to support this claim, some of which will be discussed here. There have been a number of comparative studies of psychotherapy, drug treatment, and a combination of both in the treatment of panic disorder and most have indicated that a combination is superior to mono-therapy of either type (Bandelow, Lichte, Rudolf, Wiltink, & Beutel, 2014). There are other methods that are also used, but current research shows that none appear to be as effective as this combination. Anxiety disorders are the most common mental illnesses, although persons suffering from them rarely seek treatment. Specific phobias are the most common type of anxiety disorder followed closely by panic disorder/agoraphobia (PDAG). Anxiety disorders are now thought to originate from an interaction of psychosocial, genetic, and neurobiological factors (Bandelow et al., 2014). Panic disorder (PD) is associated with significant personal, social, and economic costs and ranks among the most expensive psychiatric disorders (White et al., 2013). Merriam-Webster defines panic disorder, panic attack and agoraphobia as...
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...INTRODUCTION Everyone experienced some sort of anxiety feeling before an important event, such as an important exam, going on the 1st date, going on the roller coaster for the 1st time, and etc. during their lifetime. When this anxiety start to be an overwhelming thought in a person’s mind and causes nightmares, fears, and panic attacks, it becomes an illness, called anxiety disorder. It is the fear, apprehension, and often the expectation of unspecified danger. It is considered a normal natural response used everyday to figure out whether a situation is dangerous or not. How to differentiate a normal anxiety form an abnormal disorder: The intensity of the anxiety; whether or not the anxiety matches the circumstance. The length of the anxiety is inappropriate to what is causing the anxiety. Adequately respond to make a decision in what to do in that our body has alarm us to some danger. Anxiety is a total normal thing and is experienced daily. But when you have consistent anxiety you should start to worry. Anxiety is a reaction to stressful situations that helps rather than hinders daily functions. If we didn’t have anxiety we wouldn’t be motivated to do certain things in life that could be a good accomplishment or help us out. Anxiety Disorder is defined as the occurrence of anxiety without obvious external cause, intruding on daily functioning. Now I will discuss Generalized Anxiety Disorder. Generalized Anxiety Disorder is the experience of long-term anxiety with...
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...Thomas Instructor: Cristina Russu Ph. D Psychology 105 – Intro to Psychology December 4, 2011 This paper will discuss the mental disorder of phobias, and the available treatment options. A phobia is a type of anxiety disorder. It is a strong, irrational fear of something that poses little or no actual danger. There are many specific phobias. Acrophobia is a fear of heights. You may be able to ski the world's tallest mountains but be unable to go above the 5th floor of an office building. Agoraphobia is a fear of public places, and claustrophobia is a fear of closed-in places. If you become anxious and extremely self-conscious in everyday social situations, you could have a social phobia. Other common phobias involve tunnels, highway driving, water, flying, animals and blood. People with phobias try to avoid what they are afraid of. If they cannot, they may experience panic and fear, rapid heartbeat, shortness of breath, trembling, and a strong desire to get away. Treatment helps most people with phobias. Treatment options include medicines, therapy or both. http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/phobias.html A phobia is defined as the unrelenting fear of a situation, activity, or thing that causes one to want to avoid it. The three types of phobias are social phobia (fear of public speaking, meeting new people, or other social situations), agoraphobia (fear of being outside), and specific phobias (fear of particular items or situations). Phobias are largely...
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...Disorders Writing Assignment The purpose of this project is to give you experience in making clinical diagnoses and to attempt to make sense of the many psychological disorders that are out there. You have been assigned to watch a popular movie. I decided to give this to you before Christmas Break because you will have at least 2 weeks to think of the movies form the list and watch one or two or whatever number you want. Pretend that you are a clinical psychologist, and the character in the movie has come in to your office. There is one central character in the movie that has symptoms of a psychological disorder (sometimes there may be more than one character; I have given you the character with the most obvious symptoms). In your paper, you should give a brief description of the character. Then, you should answer the following: o Identify the diagnosis that you would make of the character. • You should back up your diagnosis with the relevant symptoms displayed by the character (in other words, explain why did you make the diagnosis that you did). Refer to the movie to illustrate the symptoms that the character demonstrates. • Discuss all the possible symptoms of the disorder; does the client show all the possible symptoms, or only some of the possible symptoms of the disorder? • In some cases, the character may be lying, and does not really have a disorder. For example, the person may be faking the disorder to avoid prosecution for a...
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...Psych 1 Research paper Psychological Disorders Psychological disorders can be very serious, and in most cases are very serious. As many as 450 million people suffer around the world from mental illnesses, including various anxiety disorders, mood disorders, psychotic disorders and more. Psychological disorders can be mentally debilitating and even lead to self-harm and suicide. These disorders and illnesses are nothing to joke about and should be taken seriously. Psychologists point that while someone may have a disorders, they shouldn't be looked at as they're disorder. For instance a child with autism should not be referred to as an "autistic person". Instead we should say "people with autism" because there is so much more to people than their disorder. We are all still humans, regardless of the disorder or illness that some of us may have. Psychological disorders may not always be noticeable to friends, family and/or their surroundings as we may not be able to see their disability. Psychological disorders are often referred to as invisible disabilities, because even though someone may have one, they're often able to hide it from you. I think the majority of people that choose to hide their mental illnesses is due to the fact they don't want to be looked at as "crazy". I, myself, have an anxiety and mood disorder and I can say I choose to hide this from most people because I don't want to be looked at as "a crazy person" or mentally unstable, even though that may very...
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...Student Survival Guide In order to become a successful distance learner, and maintain a high degree of information absorption, I will need a series of tools to assist me. In my effort to combine these tools into an easily accessible format, I am creating this Student Survival Guide This guide will serve as a consistent tool available to me in times of crisis. By depending on this guide I will be able to repeatedly draw from skills I have learned in each block of classes throughout my educational career. In this guide I will address five major points of positive behavior that will ensure my success. These points include: conducting successful library and internet searches; upholding academic honesty; developing effective study skills; managing time wisely; and setting and achieving goals. Specific details in each of these categories will provide a functional tool to make my action plan realistic and attainable. Conducting Successful Library and Internet Searches How and where to find academic resources online: Finding academic resources online will be dependant upon the specific information I am seeking. Am I looking for statistical information; specific information related to a topic; legal information; or general knowledge of a subject? The answers to these questions will provide the type of documentation I am seeking. For instance; .org, .gov, and .edu sites will provide the most reliable information on the internet. However specific information such as legal or medical...
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...University AUTISM, ATTACHMENT AND PARENTING 2 Abstract This paper examines Rutgers et al.’s research article regarding autism, attachment and parenting. It is a comparison of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), Mental Retardation (MR), Language Disorder (LD), and non-clinical children. This article addressed the issues of autism, attachment security, and parenting among the clinical and non-clinical groups. The author’s attachment security research was conducted using a variety of both screening questionnaires, and several parental self-report questionnaires assessing their parenting styles, parental efficacy, experiences of daily hassles, social support and psychological problems. Through the use of these questionnaires, observations by pediatric psychologists, and a follow-up at approximately four years of age, it was demonstrated that the children with ASD were rated less securely attached than both other clinical and non-clinical groups. Also, the parents of children with ASD reported a less authoritative parenting style and felt they received less social support than the parents of non-clinical children. This paper will delve deeper into their research and consider the results as it applies to the discipline. AUTISM, ATTACHMENT AND PARENTING 3 Article Critique on Autism, Attachment and Parenting The purpose of Rutgers et al.’s research on autism, attachment, and parenting was to study young children who, having...
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...1. Introduction This paper provides a brief overview of evidence based psychological treatments for anxiety disorders. It addresses the following questions: • How common are anxiety disorders? • What psychological treatments have empirical support? • What recovery rates can be achieved with these treatments? • How enduring are their effects? • Is there value in combining psychological treatments with medication? Psychological treatments can be delivered in a variety of formats. This paper restricts itself to the traditional, and most extensively researched, format of face-to-face contact with a fully qualified therapist. For most anxiety disorders the therapy sessions are once weekly for 60-90 minutes spread over a period of 8-20 weeks, with homework assignments in between. However, in specific phobias, the strongest outcomes have been obtained with a single, long (3-5 hour) session with a therapist, followed by a briefer follow-up session a week or so later. 2. How common are anxiety disorders? The most recent British Psychiatric Morbidity Survey1 estimates that 16.4% of the population have a diagnosable anxiety and/or depressive disorder. The diagnostic system that was used in the survey (ICD-10) is different from the diagnostic system (DSM-IV) that has been used in most trials of psychological treatments. For this reason, it is difficult to be precise about the number of individuals in the UK who have anxiety disorders for which there...
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...Student’s Name Institution’s Name Course Name Submission Date Abortion With the expansion of personal freedoms through the constitutional provisions, abortion has become a question of personal choice rather than a moral question. Yet there are those who still argue that individuals should not be given the prerogative to decide if they should carry their pregnancies to term, even if that pregnancy is as a result of rape. All these arguments are misguided. In this paper, I propose that the question of aborting or not should be left to the individual(s) who has the responsibility of bringing up the child if at all the pregnancy is taken to full term. Proponents of Pro-choice argue that women who have procured an abortion have a higher propensity of suffering from a broad spectrum of mental health complications such as agoraphobia, panic attack, panic disorder, major depression, bipolar disorder and substance-abuse anomalies (Coleman et al. 45). Notably, these side effects are bound to affect women who have procured abortion and this is largely due to the fact that with opposition still coming from some sections of our societies, these women are denied their rightful societal place due to discrimination. Most of them balk away from the society as they suspect, and accurately so, that they will be discriminated against by the very people who are supposed to provide moral and psychological help. In fact, the propensity of these women to retreat into these psychological...
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...Biopsychosocial Case Study Paper Theodore (Ted) John Kaczynski—AKA the Unabomber—was born May 22, 1942 in Chicago, Illinois to Wanda and Theodore Richard Kaczynski (Meyer, Chapman & Weaver, 2009). The date of his first recorded attack was on May 25, 1978 when a package exploded at Northwestern University, and his last attack was on April 24, 1995 aimed at the California Forestry Association. However, before the spree of attacks—mostly targeting universities and airlines—Theodore Kaczynski’s life was marked by antisocial tendencies, flattened affectivity, and interpersonal dysfunction. During his primary and secondary Ted played by himself and his mother encouraged socially isolated activities, such as reading. He graduated high school one year early but was not remembered specifically by most of his class mates. He received his Ph.D. in 1967 from the University of Chicago and taught at the university level for several years before abruptly quitting and moving to a secluded cabin in Montana. Even though several diagnoses of psychological disorder are warranted, the diagnosis of schizoid personality disorder (SPD) best describes the particular features exhibit by the Unabomber over the course of his upbringing and adult years. Though, to piece together a diagnosis of SPD and the life events of Ted an overview of the case study must be presented, the psychological, social, and biological precursors of the disorder must be examined, and the application of the behavioral-cognitive...
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...treated this way. An adult saw what was going on and ran to stop it. He then took the young boy home with the little boy asking “Why?” See the young boy didn’t know that jump rope was known as “femininity”. He was raised to be open-minded and androgynous. The other boy was raised and taught the masculine gender roles and what he is appropriate and inappropriate behavior. Somehow, the other boy felt that the young boy’s behavior was inappropriate and he should be punished for it. This is what happens when development of the human sexuality is influenced by factors, such as parents, authoritative figures, peers, etc. Some people are raised differently from others and as a result of that are ridiculed and made fun of or even, hated. This paper will discuss the factors that influence the development of human...
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...May 30, 2014 Brian Hawkins Abstract This paper provides a broad overview of phobias and addictions. The difference between classical conditioning and how it relates to phobias will be dicussed, as well as operant conditioning and how it develops into addictions. Distinguishing between classical and operant conditioning, will show the differences between the two. I will cover what extinction means and how it is achieved in both types of conditioning. "Phobia" means "morbid fear" in greek (What is Phobia, 2014). Fear is a natural response to a genuine danger. Phobias are the emotional and physical reactions to feared objects or situations; this fear becomes irrational and excessive. Feelings of horror, panic and terror may occur. Reactions become automatic and uncontrollable, taking over a person's thoughts and sometimes causing physical symptoms. These symptoms can include rapid heartbeat, shortness of breath, trembling and overwhelming desire to avoid the feared object or situation. There are three major categories of phobias. First category called specific phobias focuses on certain objects, animals, people and situations. Some of the most recognized phobias fall under this category; the fear of heights (acrophobia), the fear of spiders (arachnophobia) and the fear of enclosed spaces(claustrophobia). The second major category is the fear of open spaces (agoraphobia). Most individual affected by this become prisoner in their own homes...
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...An Experiment on Public Speaking Anxiety in Response to Three Different Types of Virtual Audience David-Paul Pertaub*, Mel Slater*, Chris Barker** *Department of Computer Science **Department of Psychology University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT 2 An Experiment on Public Speaking Anxiety in Response to Three Different Types of Virtual Audience Abstract This paper describes an experiment to assess the anxiety responses of people giving five minute presentations to virtual audiences consisting of eight male avatars. There were three different types of audience behaviour -an emotionally neutral audience that remained static throughout the talk, a positive audience which exhibited friendly and appreciative behaviour towards the speaker, and a negative audience, which exhibited hostile and bored expressions throughout the talk. A second factor was immersion: half of the 40 subjects experienced the virtual seminar room through a head-tracked head-mounted display and the remainder on a desktop system. Responses were measured using standard Personal Report of Confidence as a Public Speaker (PRCS) which was elicited prior to the experiment and after each talk. Several other standard psychological measures such as SCL-90-R (for screening for psychological disorder), the SAD and the FNE were also measured prior to the experiment. Other response variables included subjectively assessed somaticisation and a subject self-rating scale on performance...
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