Anxiety Treatment – Natural Remedies for Anxiety
An Introduction to Anxiety Disorders
OTHER/ALTERNATIVE TREATMENTS FOR ANXIETY
What would be considered additional interventions for anxiety disorders?
While you will not read about additional interventions in standard psychiatric texts, many patients over the years report all kinds of interventions they have done for themselves to help manage their anxiety. These are harder to study in a strictly scientific way, but I believe they help as augmentation strategies. Patients suffering from the depths of loneliness have gone to the local pound and found a new dog to help fill this void.
Others have used humor to lighten up otherwise dark nights of the soul, either via going to comedy clubs, reading recognized humorous literature, or reconnecting with old friends with senses of humor. Still others have developed an artistic pursuit that has provided an invaluable outlet for their depression, be it sculpture, dance, painting, jewelry design, creative writing, dressmaking, or whatever might help translate internal frustration into an external work of art that expresses those feelings.
Rick’s comments:
Humor has been a great coping mechanism for me. I love to listen to comedy as well as to perform and to write it on occasion. It would be nice to think that as I search for further help with my OCD and anxiety that I might be helping others who are going through a difficult time by making them laugh. (Once in a while I tell jokes that don’t make people laugh, however I don’t think they do any lasting harm!) On the other hand, going to a comedy club, if I’m performing, usually doesn’t relieve my anxiety. Standing on a stage, in front of strangers, is not necessarily a good anxiety reducer, yet it’s an experience I wouldn’t have missed for the world. Some anxiety is worth the price!
Can I ever get virtual reality treatment or treat myself on the Internet?
These questions raise the possibility of treating oneself. If living abroad in a country where you cannot find a psychiatrist who speaks your language, this becomes an even more relevant question. If you are so phobic and/or scared of doctors that you cannot leave your house or see a doctor as a function of your anxiety, then it also becomes relevant. In short, it is important to do whatever works for you. I am not aware of any Internet-based treatment Web sites, though an abundant number of Web sites exist for you to learn more about anxiety disorders. Because interaction with people is a common fear in anxiety, interaction with a treatment professional can be therapeutic. This factor, in conjunction with taking the step of obtaining the right diagnosis from a professional, makes consultation in person the best starting point. If you are abroad or are attempting to seek help for a relative abroad, or if you are unable to leave home, one place to start is Dr. Edmund Bourne’s Anxiety and Phobia Workbook. You could combine this work with a telephone consultation with a psychiatrist in the United States until a more longitudinal strategy can be put in place. If you believe that you have OCD and cannot leave home for fear of contagion or other type of exposure, order Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz’s Brain Lock: Free Yourself from Obsessive Compulsive Behavior.
Getting this self-help can help you make it to a psychiatrist’s office or emergency room. If you explain this story over the phone to a mental health professional, he will understand that you are doing the best that you can. He will also know that you are capable of doing more under different circumstances.
Dr. Joann Difede of New York Hospital-Cornell has done interesting work using virtual reality to treat terrorism survivors from New York’sWorld Trade Center. By gradually replaying video scenes of the day, from more benign to frankly traumatic-initially without but then with volume-she has provided a unique kind of exposure therapy with some remarkable results. Her work compels us to ask how much technology of this age might be used to tailor treatments that could desensitize patients to traumatic memories. However, this kind of technique, like any other treatment for anxiety, would best be done with a mental health professional who would know how to incorporate this type of work into the overall treatment of any given individual’s program.
How could hypnosis help me?
Hypnosis has been used over the centuries to mobilize cure.Today we understand much more of the science behind it. Finding a way to access a deep, hyper-focused, partially dissociated trancelike state allows the power of the mind to exert itself. All hypnosis becomes self-hypnosis, mobilizing an individual’s ability to hypnotize him. The results are compelling and powerful. Patients who learn to use self-hypnosis have fewer symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome, require less pain medication in hospitals, and deliver babies without epidural anesthesia. Hypnosis can also serve in the treatment of phobias and posttraumatic stress disorder, allowing one to imagine oneself taking off in an airplane or revisiting traumatic memories in a more controlled setting. Anyone who performs hypnosis regularly-usually psychiatrists or psychologists-can speak to the power of this technique.
How could biofeedback or guided imagery help me?
Biofeedback therapy uses a basic mind-body principle to help one regulate oneself. Most treatments utilize some combination of the following ideas. The patient is hooked up to a set of instruments that monitor heart rate, sweating response, breathing, and brain electrical activity. Focusing on images that help to soothe the patient can, in time, lead to a lessening of all of the above parameters. As the patient learns to correlate the decrease in mental functioning and heart rate with a calming of the mind via the imagery, new mental and physiologic responses become available to the patient at a time of stress. Some interventions can lead, over time, to a marked ability to monitor internal physiologic states and thus modulate one’s internal environment when experiencing an external stressor.
Term:
Biofeedback – a method of monitoring one’s physical responses to anxiety inducing situations and attempting to lower the anxiety by reducing the physical response.
