Anxiety, panic and phobic disorders: an overview.

This paper reviews anxiety, panic, and phobic disorders as they were described in landmark works, along with more recent epidemiologic studies of the disorders. The author discusses clinical syndromes of anxiety as outlined in the DSM-III: agoraphobia, social phobia, generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, simple phobic states, and obsessive-compulsive disorder, relating them to Phobic Anxiety-Depersonalization Syndrome and to earlier descriptions by Westphal and Benedict. The paper addresses the problem of delineating anxiety and phobic states from depressive disorders, with regard to diagnosis and treatment outcome. Various etiological bases of agoraphobia, panic, and anxiety disorders are suggested: heredity, life events and circumstances, family background and developmental history, the premorbid personality, and some psychological aspects. Several questions are explored on the relationships of agoraphobia, anxiety and panic attacks. For example, is agoraphobia a new disease or one stage in the development of severe chronic anxiety? Are the phobias of agoraphobia acquired by conditioning or learning? Are "panics" spontaneous or physiological? Are panic attacks the first event in the primary cause of agoraphobia? For future work the authors propose a reassessment of the prevalence of agoraphobia and related disorders, a more careful definition of the agoraphobic disorders, and thorough clinical investigation of the various treatment modalities in well-defined populations. The past twenty years' achievements in behavioural and pharmacological treatments for agoraphobia are briefly recapitulated.