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Anxiety can be a normal reaction to stress. It can help us deal with a tense situation, studying harder for an exam, or keep focused on an important speech. In general, it can help us cope. Butwhen anxiety becomes an excessive, irrational dread
of everyday situations, it has become a disabling condition. Examples of anxiety disorders are obsessive compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stressdisorder,
Social phobia, specific phobia, and generalized anxiety disorder. Symptoms of many of these disorders begin in childhood or adolescence. Yesterday the brain areas and circuitries underlyingsymptoms of anxiety disorders were unknown.
No targeted psychotherapies for anxiety disorders existed.
Clinicians did not have strong information to help them make treatment decisions between a specificpsychotherapy, medication alone, or a combination
of medication and psychotherapy. Today
A large, national survey of adolescent mental health reported that about 8 percent of teens ages 13–18 have ananxiety disorder, with symptoms commonly emerging around age 6. However, of these teens, only 18 percent received mental health
care.
Imaging studies show that children with anxiety
disorders haveatypical activity in speciic brain
areas, compared with other people. For example:
In one, very small study, anxious adolescents
exposed to an anxiety-provoking situation
showed heightened activity inbrain structures
associated with fear processing and emotion
regulation, when compared with normal
controls.
Another small study found that youth with
generalized anxiety disorder had unchecked
activityin the brain’s fear center, when looking
at angry faces so quickly that they are hardly
aware of seeing them.
Brain scans of teens sizing each other up reveal
an emotion circuit activating more ingirls as they
grow older, but not in boys. his inding highlights
how emotion circuitry diverges in the male and
female brain during a developmental stage in
which girls are at increased risk for...