ABSTRACT
Mood and anxiety disorders are among the most common mental health disorders, with a huge individual, societal, and economic burden. Anxiety disorders is an umbrella term for a number of disorders, including specific phobias, social phobias, posttraumatic stress disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, agoraphobia, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Anxiety disorders all share a common theme of a heightened sense of arousal accompanied by physical and psychological symptoms that can be either generalized or linked to specific triggers. Major breakthroughs in the 1950s and 1960s resulted in the development of tricyclic antidepressants and monoamine oxidase inhibitors for depression and benzodiazepines for anxiety disorders. The mainstay of pharmacological therapy for depression remains selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, serotonin–noradrenaline reuptake inhibitors, tricyclic antidepressants, monoamine oxidase inhibitors, and others, which all aim to increase the amount of monoamines, such as serotonin or noradrenaline, at the synapse.
