Psychodynamic Approach To Anxiety

Words: 1518
Pages: 7

One aspect in today's world that is quite misunderstood are mental illnesses, more specifically: anxiety. Anxiety is when someone is in fear or nervous about something leading to increased hypervigilance, common examples can be a case of having a phobia or obsessive compulsive disorder. In order to deal with anxiety disorders, some psychologists and scientists have attempted to approach the disorders in several ways.

The first approach is behavioral; this is the attempt of explaining behavior in terms of observation and in terms of what can be learned (1). Behaviorists, people who may accept the existence of feelings but instead feel that someone's behavior should be the subject of matter (2), believe that phobias are learned responses to stimuli. Skinner in 1938 attempted to prove that anxiety arises by a learning process by making a distinction between classical and operant conditioning. Classical conditioning is where a response is triggered by a particular stimulus, whereas operant conditioning is when responses are learned by the consequences of a certain behavior (3). A classic conditioning example is Pavlov (1928) dogs which learned that the ring of a bell would lead to food being served, this then meant the dogs would salivate. Soon the dogs begin to
…show more content…
One of the main drugs is SNRI's which are serotonin/noradrenaline reuptake inhibitors, this means that the neurotransmitters will stay in a person's system for longer before being reabsorbed. These cause an increase in happiness which obviously reduces fear and thus anxiety. Another drug which is being prescribed is benzodiazepines; these act as sedatives which increase the effect of a chemical known as GABA. GABA reduces the activity of brain areas which lead to emotions and memory, which eventually means that a person will be less able to recall on past feelings which lead to anxiety, known as anterograde amnesia