Anxiety is Anxiety
In the standard ICD-10 system, anxiety comes as one of the phobic anxiety disorders, as ‘ episodic paroxysmal anxiety ’ (i.e. panic disorder), as generalized anxiety disorder and even as mixed anxiety and depressive disorder.
Abstract
Most anxiety is quite good for you. It ‘ psychs ’ you up, it gets you going on tasks and it is part of your ‘ fi ght or fl ight ’ mechanism. Anxiety that is too severe or too prolonged becomes an illness: morbid anxiety. In the standard classifi cation system (ICD-10), it comes as one of the phobic anxiety disorders, as ‘ episodic paroxysmal anxiety ’ (i.e. panic disorder), as generalized anxiety disorder and even as mixed anxiety and depressive disorder. These are unclear and diffuse categories, with many overlapping symptoms, and not especially helpful in terms of deciding treatment. In my role as a General Adult Psychiatrist, I do many liaison clinics with different general practitioner (GP) practices, dealing with GP questions and seeing the more complex primary care patients.