Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is defined as the presence of average levels of anxiety, much higher than those that, in principle, would be logical based on a given situation and the way in which a person would have to react to a situation. important event.
The person himself is aware that his state is not logical, that is, he does not know how to attribute his state to facts, to things that are happening to him in life. He is the first to be surprised to suddenly have such symptoms.
Those symptoms are, basically, a lot of fear, a lot of feeling of tension in the face of nothing specific. He has the feeling that negative things seem to happen to him suddenly, he doesn't know which ones, he doesn't know how to define them, it's all in general.
And when what he describes is a sensation of permanent alarm, of permanent hypervigilance along with that state, which is unpleasant in itself, that person almost always explains that, more or less continuously, or very frequently throughout the day, have physical symptoms of anxiety; whether they are palpitations, a feeling of diarrhea, a feeling of suffocation, some tremor, some sweating….
All this combined means that very often that person, if he is doing something that is not a task for him, has to stop doing it, has to flee the situation because of that feeling of alarm that may be growing at that moment.
There are times when the person does not even arrive to do something. He directly refuses to do it because he feels that it is going to go wrong, that if it is a sensation that he feels inside, a thought of alarm, of fear, he doesn't know what.
An indefinite fear that another person could interpret as if they were a very scared person, very anxious, who is overwhelmed by everything.
That is not like that.
The anxiety disorder analyzed is a disease that suddenly appears. We could say that the most frequent is that it appears between 25 or 35 years of age.
This does not mean that the person who suffers from it has to be a person with a propensity for anxiety. In the same way, we cannot say that a person must have been highly stressed in the months prior to suffering from this disease.
Perhaps it would be more correct to say that it is somewhat easier to develop generalized anxiety disorder if one is anxious or has been stressed recently. But it would not be correct to say that this premise has to be fulfilled. You may have had a quiet life without significant levels of stress, and suddenly you begin to suffer from this disease.
Which is the treatment?
It is convenient to know the advantages and disadvantages of both psychological and pharmacological treatment. A very important aspect in this disease is to warn the patient that it is possible that, after three months, three years, or after five, the symptoms may reappear.
Everything that one has managed to learn or cure from psychological treatment, we can apply again in the future. When you can stop the disease yourself, stop the consequences, it is because you have learned a lot about psychological treatment.
On the other hand, there is the pharmacological treatment that is clearly faster in terms of efficacy, but with the very clear drawback that, once we remove the drug, it will no longer have protection for the future and, therefore, it will tend to have relapses.
From this, perhaps we could say that, ideally, it would be to have both treatments and, depending on the intensities of the symptoms, give priority to one or the other. That is, maintaining the combination of both, on many occasions, is beneficial.
There are two groups of drugs that use us: one is the group that very quickly releases the physical and bodily symptoms of anxiety, and then we have those that would be part of the group of what is called antidepressants. There are several antidepressants that, not suddenly, but after a few weeks, can make that feeling of tension, of diffuse fear, gradually reduce.
It is important to note that generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is not the same as being a neurotic. There are many symptoms of anxiety and that the patient does not understand. In the first, the person usually functions in one way and suddenly. from these constant symptoms of anxiety changes. In neuroticism, the individual has always functioned in this way, considers that this feeling is justified and is not surprised by feeling that way.