Anxiety Disorder Analysis

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Having an anxiety disorder sucks. Laura from Denver delineates her anxiety as “an intense constant fear...It’s a sinking feeling in your stomach--almost as if someone is stalking you and you never know when those arms are going to wrap around you and drag you away,” which doesn’t exactly sound pleasant (“Why Are Anxiety Disorders among Women on the Rise?”). The sad thing is, her analysis is incredibly accurate. The good thing is, Laura from Denver is not alone. She has me! What initially gave me peace in regards to being diagnosed with an anxiety disorder was the thought that not many people suffer from one, or that diagnoses were declining. Wrong! The western world is in the midst of an epidemic, in fact. Seeing that “outpatient appointments …show more content…
These are just the cases that sought treatment, so these statistics discount people that are diagnosed but forgo treatment, as well as those suffering without a diagnosis. The National Institute of Mental Health determined 28.8% of adults suffer from an anxiety disorder over their lifetime. In 2014 there were 245,273,438 people over the age 18. Roughly 30% of that is 70,638,750 people, or 22.2% of the total population (“Total Population by Child and Adult Populations”). That alone is quite a copious amount of people, and it doesn’t even include those under the age of 18. If there were 73,583,618 people under the age of 18 in the United States in 2014 (“Total Population by Child and Adult Populations”) and 25.1% of children are impacted, that makes 18,469,488 children (“Any Anxiety Disorder Among Children.”). Over 89 million altogether. As defined by the CDC, the word “Epidemic refers to an increase, often sudden, in the number of cases of a disease above what is normally expected in that population,” and given the large number of people affected and the increase in the number of treated cases, anxiety is indeed an epidemic (“Lesson 1: Introduction To …show more content…
But that’s not all they have to do with each other. Essentially, the body’s response to stress is anxiety. The Gale Encyclopedia of Mental Disorders outlines the body’s stress response in 2 major steps: “the activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal system” which releases “cortisol, the primary stress hormone in humans”, and then releases “neurotransmitters known as catecholamines”. Catecholamines have three important effects. The first is the activation of the amygdala “that triggers the emotional response of fear”, the second is the signaling of the hippocampus to store the emotional experience as memory, and lastly “suppress activity in parts of the brain associated with short term memory, concentration, and rational thinking” (Thackery 938). Constant exposure to stress would prolong these responses. It would mean a chronic state of fear and lack of rational thinking, both things that characterize anxiety and anxiety disorders. Anxiety disorders cause people to interpret stimuli irrationally, and since stress shuts down rational thought, chronic stress would alter perception of stimuli for long periods of time, triggering the fight-or-flight response that characterizes anxiety and then not turning it
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