Treatment
Many people with anxiety disorders can be helped with treatment. Therapy for anxiety
disorders often involves medication or specific forms of psychotherapy.
Medications, although not cures, can be very effective at relieving anxiety symptoms.
Today, thanks to research by scientists at NIMH and other research institutions, there are
more medications available than ever before to treat anxiety disorders. So if one drug is
not successful, there are usually others to try. In addition, new medications to treat
anxiety symptoms are under development.
For most of the medications that are prescribed to treat anxiety disorders, the doctor
usually starts the patient on a low dose and gradually increases it to the full dose.
Every medication has side effects, but they usually become tolerated or diminish with
time. If side effects become a problem, the doctor may advise the patient to stop taking
the medication and to wait a week—or longer for certain drugs—before trying
another one. When treatment is near an end, the doctor will taper the dosage gradually.
Research has also shown that behavioral therapy and cognitive-behavioral therapy can be
effective for treating several of the anxiety disorders.
Behavioral therapy focuses on changing specific actions and uses several techniques to
decreases or stop unwanted behavior. For example, one technique trains patients in
diaphragmatic breathing, a special breathing exercise involving slow, deep breaths to
reduce anxiety. This is necessary because people who are anxious often hyperventilate,
taking rapid shallow breaths that can trigger rapid heartbeat, lightheadedness, and other
symptoms. Another technique—exposure therapy—gradually exposes patients to what
frightens them and helps them cope with their fears.
Like behavioral therapy, cognitive-behavioral therapy teaches patients to react
differently to the situations and bodily sensations that trigger panic attacks and other
anxiety symptoms. However, patients also learn to understand how their thinking patterns
contribute to their symptoms and how to change their thoughts so that symptoms are less
likely to occur. This awareness of thinking patterns is combined with exposure and other
behavioral techniques to help people confront their feared situations. For example,
someone who becomes lightheaded during a panic attack and fears he is going to die can be
helped with the following approach used in cognitive-behavioral therapy. The therapist
asks him to spin in a circle until he becomes dizzy. When he becomes alarmed and starts
thinking, "I'm going to die," he learns to replace that thought with a more
appropriate one, such as "It's just a little dizziness—I can handle it."
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