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Thursday, March 28, 2024

The causes of Anxiety Disorders.

The onset and clinical course of an anxiety disorder depends on the parallel and simultaneous action of many predisposing factors. These factors are divided into psychological, neurochemical and genetic ones. The way in which they interact with each other is different for each particular patient.

The psychological predisposing factors are themselves divided into intrapersonal and interpersonal ones. Intrapersonal psychological factors refer to the relationship that the patient has with the functioning of his/her own organism. For instance, the patient with high psychological mindfulness is more capable to direct his/her attention to the different aspects of his/her emotional life, to understand their meaning and to attempt to change them, if s/he is not happy with them. On the contrary, the patient with low psychological mindfulness rarely directs his/her attention to his/her emotional life and experiences difficulty to understand its less obvious manifestations. Often, his/her emotions lead to unexpected somatic arousal and s/he responds with anxiety towards of his/her bodily reactions.

The interpersonal psychological factors refer to the nature of the relational aspects of the patient’s social environment.  For instance, the parent who wants too much to protect the child from an uncertain career choice is susceptible to continuously put pressure on the child to subscribe to the parent’s more balanced view, which, according to the parent, is the result of his/her long experience in life. This parental attitude creates exactly the kind of relationship with the child that eventually destroys the child’s ability for self-reliance and inadvertently facilitates the psychopathology of anxiety.

The genetic predisposing factors are not yet satisfactorily understood. The research on the connection between anxiety and the human genes is the most recent scientific direction, in comparison to the research on the psychological and the neurochemical factors. However, the overall contribution of the genetic research agenda is for the time being limited to the production of knowledge about the aetiology of anxiety disorders but has not yet expanded on the therapeutic intervention for them.

It is important to remember:

The therapy of an anxiety disorder does not depend on your genetic predisposition. It depends on how much you will really want to get well.

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