Mental Illness And Social Anxiety

Social anxiety, also known as social phobia, is a feeling of fear and discomfort of being judged badly by other people. Anyone can experience this at work, school, special events, and even at doing everyday things. Many people have experienced a feeling like this and that is normal. But having a social anxiety disorder can have a huge affect in someone’s life style. The effects of having disorder can lead to bad results in life.

Social anxiety is “a fear of humiliation or of being judged by others, and an avoidance of social situations where attention centers on the individual” (Martis). According to the Social Anxiety Institute, social anxiety has become the third largest psychological disorder, following depression and alcoholism (Richards). Commonly, victims of this social phobia have problems pursuing social environments, interactions, and relationships (“Social Anxiety Disorder”). The failure to fulfill daily requirements in jobs, social settings, and relationships often leaves them feeling “powerless, alone, or even ashamed” (“Social Anxiety Disorder”). Today in America,“15 million [people] suffer[from] the disorder” (“Social Anxiety Disorder”). Of the 15 million American adults affected, women and men are equally prone to develop the phobia (“Social Phobia (Social Anxiety Disorder)”). Currently, the prevalence rate for acquiring social anxiety disorder is “13-14% of all Americans” and continues to rise (Richards). As the number of people affected by social anxiety continues to rise, the understanding of social anxiety’s causes, effects, and treatments is crucial.

Reported for the first time in the 18th century, was the use of convulsive therapy.

Mental health problems such as depression and anxiety have been attributed to several factors such as excessive stress, genetic predisposition, biochemical imbalances, and even sociocultural status. As with other diseases, mental illnesses are often manifested through a combination of physical as well as emotional symptoms.

The Age of Anxiety was an extremely influential period of time where people

Part one spans over the years 1750-1900, and elaborates on the developments of varying treatments that were administered to mental patients during this time. Whitaker writes of methods like dunking the patients in water, bloodletting, the tranquilizer

Recent history of mental health highlights the Victorian perspective of a “mania and melancholia’ model, where mental disorders are separate, naturally occurring categories, often genetically determined (Kraepelin, 1883). This was a perspective based on eugenics – i.e. it was only the chronically poor who suffered mental health issues. This perspective was challenged when society was faced with officers returning from the trenches of World War I suffering from shellshock.

Emotional sickness has been a mind boggling point since the development of its known presence. While the meaning of dysfunctional behavior has developed, and been re-imagined for quite a long time, it can be best marked as a mutable, or a regularly changing thought that for all intents and purposes changes the result for treatment. (DeYoung 259) In early developments, up until about the nineteenth century, having an emotional instability was rejected as a man being under an obscure stupor which could bring about those being secured away mental homes forever. The other more radical conclusion had a tendency to be individuals who were rationally unwell were controlled by some kind of wicked compel and the best way to evacuate this underhanded drive was by expulsion or conceivable murder. While human blunder and

Many changes happen in the body when a person becomes anxious. One of the first changes is that the individual experiences an increased breathing rate. Breathing rapidly throws off the balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the body thereby, triggering additional physical anxiety symptoms such as dizziness, a feeling of suffocation, increased heart rate, and muscle tension. Learning to slow down breathing can help bring physical symptoms of anxiety back under control. In addition to

4. People back in the 1930s often mistook the Insane Asylums as torture houses, but in fact, they were housings for the mentally unstable unstable. The patients were often shocked but that was to help with schizophrenia and bipolar diseases, some thought that shock-induced seizures were helpful because the patient would not remember when they regained conscience. Another way they thought that cured them was that they drilled two holes in their skull and stuck two metal rods in the holes and scraped away the frontal lobe of the brain (The part they thought to cause the disorders)

Anxiety and anxiety disorders have been around since the beginning of humans. Anxiety disorder is defined as a mental disorder characterized by overwhelming tension and irrational fear accompanied by physiological arousal (Huffman & Sanderson, 2015). In Ancient Greece, what we know as anxiety was first known as “hysteria.” Because of this, it was presupposed that the uterus caused this behavior. In the early Renaissance era, women who were affected by this hysteria were accused of being witches. Different areas of the world at this time would treat the disorder in various ways. For example, in Spain women were tortured, in Britain women were executed, and if you lived in Scotland you would be publicly burned at the stake in front of the townspeople.

Although, all anxiety disorders essentially overlap each other still they can be differentiated by examining closely the symptoms of anxiety, and situations which are feared, including the exploration of cognition.

The Social anxiety Association classifies social anxiety as the fear of interacting with other and social situations. Social anxiety causes fear and anxiety in most if not all aspects of ones lives. Social anxiety is the fear of being negatively judge or evaluated by others. It is a chronic disease that it does not go away on its own, only direct cognitive-behavioral therapy can help people overcome their social anxiety. There are a few situations that can trigger social anxiety such as being introduced to

Joan Busfield’s article also inspired this dissertation’s research concerning the gender anxiety of nineteenth-century mental illness. Busfield argued there was not a clear difference between women and men being admitted to the asylums based on ground of insanity. I found this interesting considering there was a social anxiety that women were committed

Fear is a common emotion exhibited by people who stutter (PWS). The fear of negative evaluation is commonly displayed by PWS (Fjola, 1246); when this fear is significantly excessive, the PWS may meet the criteria for a clinical diagnosis of social anxiety (Brundage, Winters, & Beilby, p. 499). Social anxiety frequently causes PWS to isolate themselves from social interactions, and, when in situations, to utilize safety behaviors to prevent stuttering and reduce anxiety. Safety behaviors consequently maintain social anxiety in PWS rather than exacerbate the disorder (Lowe et al., 2017, pp. 1246-1247). More is known regarding the development of social anxiety is adults who stutter (AWS) than the information pertaining to children who stutter (CWS) and their fear of negative evaluation which results in social anxiety (Iverach, Menzies, O’Brian, Packman, & Onslow, 2011, p. 228). The difference in available information may be due to the thought that social anxiety is a short-term effect in CWS but a life-long effect in AWS (Iverach, Jones, McLellan, Lyneham, Menzies, Onslow, & Rapee, 2016, p. 15).