While anxiety is something that affects everyone at one time or another, some people suffer from an anxiety that pervades and dominates every aspect of their lives: Generalised Anxiety Disorder. These sufferers require treatment in order to lead normal lives and over the last two decades a number of possible avenues for treatment have been developed. These have included behavioural therapies, cognitive therapies, pharmacological therapies and cognitive-behavioural therapies. While each of these therapies has its benefits and successes, they also have their limitations which has meant the search for effective treatment strategies has continued. Only one of the above strategies, cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT), has emerged as a widely used and successful therapy today. It's success at alleviating the symptoms of GAD with low treatment dropout rates and low post-treatment relapse rates has ensured that its use today is growing, as is the empirical support for usefulness.
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Generalised Anxiety Disorder.
Many people, especially in our modern society, confess to being worriers. That is, they mean that they worry too much, while the rest of the population is apparently laid back and relaxed. However, most of us would agree, that a certain level of anxiety acts as a motivator for our actions. We may never do anything, from catching a bus to passing an exam, without a level of anxiety. .
It is true that anxiety does serve a useful purpose in human behaviour motivation. However, there are people who constantly worry about every aspect of their lives until their anxiety becomes all embracing and dominates every part of their lives. From things as simple as what to cook for dinner to complex components of our lives such as our jobs and finances, these people are consumed by their anxiety until their excessive anxiety leads to an illness: Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD). Rather than worrying about something specific these sufferers are apprehensive about everything.
