How to Treat Chronic Anxiety Disorder Symptoms By Yourself

While behavior therapy has produced substantial and lasting benefits for many people with certain Chronic Anxiety Disorders, it is not a panacea. Many people are unable or unwilling to invest the time and effort necessary to ensure a successful outcome, some fail to improve sufficiently despite intensive anxiety treatment efforts, and others do not have access to adequately trained behavior therapists. In addition, the success of behavior therapy has been best established for only some aspects of Anxiety Disorders (phobic avoidance and rituals), and its value for other components of Chronic Anxiety Disorders is less established. The patients who were involved in the successful long-term follow-up studies referred to above may have been a fairly select group and not representative of the majority of others with the same disorders.

It is mind-boggling to realize that 100 million people all over the world are now suffering from severe biological depression or chronic anxiety disorder and that only about two out of every ten receive medical treatment. Hundreds of thousands of additional people suffer from the disease in a masked way. Their severe anxiety disorder appears in the form of physical symptoms that can include migraine headaches, backaches, stomachaches, or other gastrointestinal complaints. If their true disease were diagnosed and treated, their physical chronic anxiety symptoms would disappear.

In Panic Disorder, in the absence of avoidance behaviors, drug therapy has been conclusively shown to reduce or eliminate panics and chronic anxiety while the role of behavior therapy has not been established. While it is true that the relapse rate is high when drugs are discontinued, they have been used to effectively treat many patients with Panic Disorders over long periods of time with a minimum of inconvenience.

While patients with chronic Anxiety Disorders may relapse when drugs are discontinued, many with short-lived anxiety problems benefit from drug therapy and do not relapse with discontinuation. In this latter group, behavior therapy may be unavailable, ineffective, or too time-consuming to justify the effort.

Finally, while self-administered behavior chronic anxiety therapy has no therapist costs, it can be time-consuming, and—for some— time is money. For example, a person with public speaking anxiety (Social Phobia) may prefer to take a single dose of an antianxiety drug such as propranolol before speaking engagements rather than embark on a potentially beneficial but time-consuming course of behavior therapy or anxiety support groups.

Both behavior therapy and chronic anxiety disorder drugs have important roles in the treatment of Anxiety Disorders. An important aspect of therapy is to match treatments and patients in ways that will ensure a successful, safe, and lasting outcome with a mini¬mum of risk, cost, and inconvenience.