ABSTRACT
In several significant ways, mood and anxiety disorders stand apart from the other psychiatric conditions we discuss in this book. Perhaps the most obvious is that their base rate occurrence in the population is substantially higher. For example, in Western countries, about one in five people experience clinically significant symptoms of anxiety or depression at some point during their lives, whereas most other disorders have much lower prevalence rates – of the order of one to three per cent. The symptoms that define these disorders are also much more continuous with the personality traits that give rise to them than we can claim for other Axis I conditions. Generalized Anxiety Disorder represents a particularly intuitive example of the continuity from normal personality to pathology since it describes, in large part, the extreme end of a dimension of trait anxiety, similar to the way that hypertension, as a medical condition, is simply the pathological elevation of normal blood pressure.
