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The Vocabulary of Anxiety/Panic Disorders

© Karen Hamilton

Anxiety/Panic Disorder Vocabulary List

Agoraphobia: The fear of being alone when perceiving great inner danger. Agoraphobic are usually afraid to be alone.

Anticipatory Anxiety: A type of pathological anxiety. The fear of panic feelings. Often leads to avoidance or phobia of situations that are associated with panic.

Anxiety: The body's signal of possible future danger, an emotional early warning message.

Avoidance: The phobic response to stay away from panic-producing situations, event though you would do these things if you did not have anxiety.

Depression: A mental disorder characterized by feeling hopeless, helpless, and blue or despondent. May be a single episode, a chronic condition, or recurrent over many years.

Desensitization: Practice in a fear generating situation so that the second fear is progressively reduced.

Discomfort Zone: Anxiety is measured on a scale of 0 (no anxiety) to 10 (the worst anxiety possible). the discomfort zone represents midlevel anxiety of 4 to 7.

GAD (Generalized Anxiety Disorder): General pathological anxiety without panic attacks, phobic avoidance, or pathological shyness, as well as without obsessions and compulsions.

OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder): Obsessions that are repugnant, unwanted, and intrusive thoughts leading to efforts to reduce this discomfort with compulsions, or ritual senseless behaviors, like checking or repeating a word or number over and over.

Pathological Anxiety: Normal anxiety that occurs when there is no generally understandable danger.

Phobia: A specific phobia is a particular form of situational panic such as fear of flying, fear of heights, fear of insects or snakes, or claustrophobia.

PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder): Intense fear after a traumatic event. Characterized by flashbacks to the event.

Separation Anxiety: Fear of being apart from a safe person.

Situational Panic: Occurs when panicky feelings and thoughts are closely tied to particular places or activities that repeatedly cause panic for an individual sufferer.

Social Phobia: A pathological anxiety expressed specifically as fear of embarrassment, which may be limited to public speaking or it may be part of a global shyness that limits social experiences, including dating, marriage, and friendships. Social phobics are usually more comfortable alone. People are scary to them.

Spontaneous Panic: A biologically based brain response. A fear that triggers anxious thoughts that are not linked to any specific situation. "Out of the blue" panic.

Vocabulary taken from: The Anxiety Cure, An Eight-Step Program for Getting Well, Robert L. DuPont, M.D., John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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