The heart races, the hands are sweaty, the mouth is dry – everyone probably knows situations in which they would prefer to be somewhere else. For some people, however, fear and panic attacks are so frequent and pronounced that they interfere with everyday life. Often this is only recognized as a disease at a late stage.
Pathological anxiety is one of the most common mental disorders; in Germany, it affects an estimated 15 percent of the population.
Causes of anxiety disorders
The genetic influence seems to be rather small in anxiety disorders; more weight as risk factors, on the other hand, are – especially in the case of phobias – conditioning processes, i.e. fears as a result of negative experiences (for example, after a painful examination or teasing at school), but also through observation (for example, violence in the family, the mother’s fear of spiders) and stories. Presumably, this is also the reason that fears are clustered in families.
In more recent times, representations of fears in the media have also played an increasingly important role. Such “mediated” fears are not based on one’s own concrete experience, are therefore not or only with difficulty verifiable, and can additionally lead to “fear of fear”.
If you ask Germans today what they are particularly afraid of, it is fears such as becoming a nursing case in old age or becoming terminally ill, or not having enough pension money to live on. We suffer from fear of the future, fear of terrorism and crime, fear of life-threatening environmental destruction. Such fears of expectation can also become so pronounced that they interfere with coping with everyday life in the now.
Classification of anxiety disorders
Pathological mental anxiety disorders are divided into phobias, panic disorders, and generalized anxiety disorders. More broadly, obsessive-compulsive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are also included in anxiety disorders by some professionals and classification systems.
Overall, women are more often affected (2:1 ratio on average). It is not uncommon for affected individuals to suffer from multiple anxiety disorders simultaneously; they are also at higher risk for depression and addictive disorders.
