Triumph Over Fear: A Book of Help and Hope for People with Anxiety, Panic Attacks, and Phobias - Softcover

Ross, Jerilyn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0553374443 ISBN 13: 9780553374445

Verlag: Random House Publishing Group, 1995

Inhaltsangabe

The National Institute of Mental  Health calls anxiety disorders the most common mental  health problem in America. They are also among the  most treatable. Yet tens of millions of people  struggle with hidden fears and restricted lives  because they have not received proper diagnosis and  treatment. Triumph Over Fear  combines Jerilyn Ross's firsthand account of  overcoming her own disabling phobia with inspiring case  histories of recovery from other forms of anxiety,  including panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive  disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder; an  post-traumatic stress disorder. State-of-the-art  information is combined with powerful self-help  techniques, together with clear indications of when to seek  additional professional help and/or medication.  Also included is the latest research on anxiety  disorders in children, plus advice for dealing with  family members and  employers.

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Jerilyn Ross, MA, was one of the nation’s leading experts on anxiety disorders and the author of One Less Thing to Worry About: Uncommon Wisdom for Coping with Common Anxieties. Ross received the 2004 Patient Advocacy Award from the American Psychiatric Association, the 2001 Anxiety Disorder Initiative Award from the World Council on Anxiety and the World Psychiatric Association, a 2000 Telly Award, and a 1994 Distinguished Humanitarian Award from the American Association of Applied and Preventive Psychology. She died in 2010.

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Institute of Mental Health calls anxiety disorders the most common mental health problem in America. They are also among the most treatable. Yet tens of millions of people struggle with hidden fears and restricted lives because they have not received proper diagnosis and treatment. Triumph Over Fear combines Jerilyn Ross's firsthand account of overcoming her own disabling phobia with inspiring case histories of recovery from other forms of anxiety, including panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder; an post-traumatic stress disorder. State-of-the-art information is combined with powerful self-help techniques, together with clear indications of when to seek additional professional help and/or medication. Also included is the latest research on anxiety disorders in

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Preface: The Most Common Mental Health Problem
 
At the Anxiety Disorders Association of America, the calls and the letters pour in.
 
“I saw you on that program,” says a woman who is calling from California. “The person you were describing—the one who couldn’t sign her name in public—that’s me! I began crying—I couldn’t stop—I had to call you.”
 
“I’ve been terrified to leave my house,” writes a man from New York. “I was so afraid. I couldn’t tell anybody.” (His handwritten letter goes on for twelve pages.)
 
“When the attacks first began, I was in terrible shape,” another letter begins. “I didn’t know what was happening to me. I tried to explain my feelings to my doctor; he didn’t understand and told me I was fine. I truly thought I was losing my mind.”
 
Another writes: “My phobias have been a very serious problem for the last fifteen years and have progressively gotten worse as the years go by. I have gone to all kinds of doctors and have even spent some time in the hospital to try and find out what the symptoms are or what is causing them. The frustrating part is when I am told that it is only nerves.…”
 
“No one could tell me what was wrong,” says a caller. “I’m one of those people who has to keep checking. It sometimes takes me two hours to leave the house in the morning; I check the stove, the lights, the doors. I have to keep going back.…”
 
And almost everyone says something like “No one understands how I feel. I feel so frightened. I’m missing out on so much. I have no self-esteem left.”
 
Their symptoms differ, but all of these people suffer from an anxiety disorder. Over the past fifteen years I have worked with several thousand men and women with similar problems. They are some of the bravest people I have ever met. Every day they face situations that feel as physically and emotionally terrifying and draining as walking in front of a speeding car, jumping from an airplane without a parachute, or being trapped in a burning building.
 
To someone who has not experienced an anxiety disorder, the terror, discomfort, and irrationality associated with these conditions will seem incomprehensible. Having lived through it myself, I can say that there are few experiences in life more terrifying or baffling.
 
After overcoming my own debilitating phobia—the most common of the anxiety disorders—my dream was, and continues to be, to give others the new lease on life that I was given. Whether I’m working with an individual patient, talking to a self-help group, conducting a training seminar for health-care professionals, or appearing on television, my goals remain the same: to make sure that every American who suffers from an anxiety disorder knows that he or she is not alone, helpless, or hopeless; and to see that all who do need help have access to effective treatment.
 
Approximately 23 million Americans, 13 percent of the population, suffer from an anxiety disorder, according to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). Although anxiety disorders are among the most treatable of all psychiatric disorders, fewer than one quarter of those suffering from an anxiety disorder receive treatment. Millions of others suffer in silence, or go from doctor to doctor, many having no idea what is wrong with them. And even if they do know, many are too embarrassed or frightened to ask for help.
 
But anxiety disorders are not costly only to those who suffer from them. As great a toll as they take on their victims, the toll they exact from society is perhaps even greater. Robert L. DuPont, M.D., president of the Institute for Behavior and Health in Rockville, Maryland, found in a study completed in 1993 that anxiety disorders are the most expensive of all mental illnesses.
 
Drawing on a new statistical analysis of a major survey of mental illnesses done in the early 1980s, DuPont and his team determined that anxiety disorders as a group cost an estimated $46.6 billion in 1990, almost one third of all costs for mental illness.
 
Almost three quarters of the total costs of anxiety, some $35.5 billion, were considered indirect, due to reduced or lost productivity. Treatment costs are comparatively low compared to those for such mental illnesses as schizophrenia or manic depression. However, the lost potential of those with an anxiety disorder, excluded from the cultural, economic, or social life of the country through fear and ignorance, cannot be quantified in dollars, and even the most conservative estimates can barely scratch the surface.
 
Those of us involved in anxiety-disorders research, treatment, and public and professional education are all too familiar with the gaps and frustrations in our health-care system: the inability of even some of the best health-care professionals to recognize the symptoms of an anxiety disorder and either to apply the appropriate treatment or to make an appropriate referral; and the lack of access for people with anxiety disorders to publicly funded mental-health facilities and to adequate health insurance to cover private treatment.
 
Over the years I have been repeatedly saddened by the stories of wasted years, wasted lives—real tragedies that could easily have been avoided. And yet the myths persist, principally the general misunderstanding that people with anxiety disorders are the “worried well,” people whose problems are “all in their heads” and who should simply pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
 
There are the people with agoraphobia who spend years avoiding places where they have had panic attacks until they are afraid to leave their houses, or a single room in their house. Or they cling to a “safe” person who seems to offer protection against panic attacks, or who at least will be there “if the worst happens,” whatever the worst is—often something that cannot even be expressed. Social phobics experience shyness that becomes a shackle, holding them back from any but the most minimal relationships, professional or private. These people spend lifetimes watching colleagues—often less talented, less able—surpass them professionally, watching potential friends, lovers, mates go off, never knowing what might have been had they not been effectively imprisoned by their inability to relate socially.
 
Then, too, there are the victims who turn to alcohol or drugs to temporarily ease the terror or the shyness or the flashbacks and become doubly afflicted. And, finally, there are those who see no hope, who sink into a chronic depression and perhaps eventual suicide. The National Institute of Mental Health has estimated that some 70 percent of individuals suffering from one or another of the anxiety disorders has at least one other condition requiring psychiatric attention—including substance abuse—in addition to the anxiety disorder itself. Scientists call such conditions “co-morbid” conditions.
 
THE MOST COMMON MENTAL-HEALTH PROBLEM
 
The disorders that are currently considered by specialists to belong to the broad category of anxiety disorders encompass panic disorder, phobias (including agoraphobia, simple phobias, and social phobia), obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and generalized anxiety disorder.
 
Their true extent did not become known until the early 1980s, when the National Institute of Mental Health conducted the first-ever survey of mental illness in this country. Known as the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Random House Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1995
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0553374443
• ISBN 13: 9780553374445
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar