Atlantic Surviving Anxiety Summary

In The Atlantic- Surviving Anxiety article it had several different view points throughout the article. The article began a young man Scott Stossel who suffered from a serious anxiety disorder. He went through several different coping methods such as therapy, drugs and alcohol but that didn’t seem to work for him. He also suffered from several different phobias in addition to his phobia of speaking in front of an audience. For a while he was mixing Xanax with either whiskey or vodka to help tame the anxiety of publically speaking in front of a crowd. Although he knew that mixing his medication with alcohol could cause serious affects, he claimed to only suffer from moderate anxiety for days rather than sleepless dreads for months. Scott was …show more content…
This study investigated the association between separation anxiety and actual separation events during the childhood years of adult patients with agoraphobia that may or may not also suffer from a panic disorder. To do this study, there were forty-two women participated in a long-term study, all the women had agoraphobia but some of them may or may not have had a panic disorder associated with it. Each participant went through an exposure-in-vivo treatment and were asked to follow up. The separation events occurred from ages zero to 18. This study found that individuals who suffered from childhood separation experiences and separation anxiety were significantly higher than in healthy subjects, however, a panic disorder and agoraphobia were not associated with each other. Although the study found that separation events within an adult was in fact related to the separation anxiety they suffered during their childhood years. The study also concluded that there was no correlation between the separation anxiety and panic disorder and agoraphobia. If a child experiences separation anxiety during their childhood years, it indeed plays a role with the outcome of their etiology in all …show more content…
The psychologist that he went to for many years claimed he had high levels of anxiety because of his fear for vomiting which would cause him anxiety whenever he got nervous, forming a constant cycle; which is known as catastrophizing from what I learned in class recently. After attempting to over come her phobia of vomiting with the exposure effect, she began to think it was something underlying within his childhood that may have caused his disorders. Scott had mentioned that his mother suffered from just about the same issues as Scott did, one being anxiety amongst others during her childhood years. In comparison, the study above showed that participants who experienced childhood separation and anxiety were correlated with higher rates of anxiety levels during adulthood than those of healthy participants. In contrast, there was no correlation that the anxiety and separation his mother may have experienced as a child caused her phobias to arise within her. Similarly, there is no explanation for Scott as to why he suffers so heavily from anxiety and his different phobias through genetic evaluation as of