ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the nature and clinical scope of the symptom of anxiety, its differential diagnosis and how to treat it using drugs and behavior therapy. It provides the reader with an extensive data base for the practical management of anxiety disorders. The chapter describes the phenomenology of fear and anxiety and the clinical occurrence and differential diagnosis of the symptom of anxiety. Anxiety is a fear-like emotion associated with a subjective sense of impending doom which motivates escape. Adjustment Reaction with Anxious Mood is a condition in which anxiety follows within several months of identified stress. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder consists of anxiety associated with reexperience of a prior traumatic event. Donald Klein first advanced the hypothesis that spontaneous anxiety attacks were endogenous biological events unlike the anticipatory anxiety of psychoanalytic or learning theory. Anxiety in social phobia is considerably relieved by beta blockers, because somatic anxiety symptoms frequently add to the patient’s embarrassment and thus to anxiety.
