Generally having distressing sensation of confinement or being fenced in the feeling of being helplessly exposed to some indeterminate threat, mental unrest and tension, is feature of anxiety.
Vegetative signs of dilation of pupils, facial pallor, bounds of sweating, tachycardia, dryness of mouth, diarrhea, loss of appetite, insomnia, decrease in libido and potency, increase in blood pressure and blood sugar level etc accompany anxiety syndromes.
The relationship between ICD-9 anxiety states, phobic states, obsessive-compulsive disorder and DSM-III anxiety disorders is discussed. Data are presented which show that one third of ICD-9 anxiety states are diagnosed as affective disorders by DSM-III. Research concerning cases with a concurrent affective and anxiety disorder is discussed. It is finally concluded that while DSM-III has unsolved hierarchial problems, the identification of the two disorders, panic disorder and generalized anxiety disorder, seems advantageous and the inclusion of obsessive compulsive disorder, among the anxiety disorders, reasonable.
Anxiety, GAD, Panic diosrder, Phobic anxiety disorder, Obsessive - Compulsive Disorder --- These mental illnesses are also referred to as psychoneuroses. The symptoms and disabilities associated with them are very often less severe than those encountered in the psychoses. Like the latter, however, they occur in people whose mental and intellectual development had been proceeding normally. They also differ very substantially from the psychoses in that the affected person neither loses touch with reality nor experiences disturbed thought processes. Anxiety is a symptom which they all have in common.