Anxiety

AnxietyIn the Beginning Was the Word and the Word Was Anxiety It is difficult to overstate just how important anxiety is to an understanding of all of mental health, but especially the mental health of children.What the process of inflammation is to pathophysiology and pathology, anxiety is to paediatric psychiatry.It is so persistently omnipresent that it is taken for granted, assigned to the 'human condition' and ignored as a character flaw, or a concomitant of an overprotected childhood.Of course it is part of being human.Its non-pathological variants are more common in childhood.Anxiety is made worse by overprotection and, just as inflammation is a normal process that serves a vital day-to-day function, so too does anxiety. A Psychological 'Atopy' Towards ThreatHowever, those children who come into life with a 'psychological atopy' in which their threat detection system (worry, fear and anxiety) is switched to 'incoming missiles' without much opportunity of finer modulation have a long-term vulnerability to many different mental health problems.Worry becomes rumination, overflows into agitation, leads to depressive exhaustion and, in the most extreme, paranoia and desire for relief from the torment of the ubiquitous sense of danger.Genes for obsessive compulsive disorder, social anxiety, eating disorders, somatoform disorders and environments of chronic uncertainty and trauma will play out like musical notes on the basic physiological stave of anxiety.