Generalized Anxiety Disorder Vs PTSD

The future is the unknown, hence the uncontrollable. As anxiety is a future-oriented mood-state, many individuals may be nervous of not knowing what may or may not happen, causing worry and nervousness. Two prominent anxiety disorders that focus on the feeling of worry are generalized anxiety disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), is the lack of control over of the worry process (Brown et al, 1994). When the concern over future events becomes severe and uncontrollable, it becomes maladaptive (Barlow, 2002). On the other hand, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is the condition in which the exposure of an extremely painful stressor was either experienced, or witnessed causing an intense fear, helplessness, …show more content…
Symptoms for GAD include, persistent anxiety, motor tension, autonomic hyperactivity, apprehension expectation and vigilance and scanning (Brown et al, 2001). However, PTSD symptoms include, persistent flashbacks, nightmares, severe anxiety, and tenacious avoidance of stimuli. The cause of GAD differs much from PTSD since, PTSD is a mental response to the exposure of a traumatic event, such as war, sexual assault, witnessing a murder, to name a just few. However, GAD is caused by genetic contributions (Noyes et al, 1987) and specific familial predispositions. To treat both these anxiety disorders, drugs and psychological treatments are used. In specific to GAD, Benzodiazepines are most often prescribed as they provide short-term relief (Barlow et al, …show more content…
Conversely, for PTSD, clinicians choose to expose the patient to the original trauma in order to create customized coping strategies and procedures to overcome the effects of the illness (Beck et al, 2012). This process is called psychoanalytic therapy, which allows the relieving of emotional trauma, thus relieving catharsis (Barlow et al,