General Anxiety Disorder (GAD)

General anxiety disorder (GAD) is an anxiety disorder that is characterized by excessive and uncontrollable worry about everyday things. The frequency, intensity, and duration of the worry are disproportionate to the actual source of worry, and such worry often interferes with daily functioning.

Treatments for GAD include medications and cognitive behavioral therapy. A combination of the two has proved the most effective in alleviating symptoms; medication alone may reduce some anxiety but will not eliminate it entirely.

SSRIs and SNRIs are commonly used to treat GAD. Examples include SSRIs such as fluvoxamine (Luvox, Faverin), sertraline (Zoloft), paroxetine (Paxil, Seroxat), citalopram (Celexa), escitalopram (Lexapro, Cipralex) and the SNRI venlafaxine (Efexor). The antiepileptic pregabalin (Lyrica) is also used. Benzodiazepenes such as diazepam and alprazolam are sometimes used in the short-term in order to alleviate extreme cases of anxiety, but they are not safe for continuous use because of the high risk of dependency. The anti-anxiety drug buspirone (BuSpar) is sometimes used in addition to or instead of SSRIs in the treatment of GAD.

SSRIs and SNRIs are generally considered the most effective treatment because both anxiety and depression are thought to be associated with the neurotransmitter serotonin; thus a great deal of people who experience depression also experience anxiety symptoms. When both disorders are diagnosed, this is called comorbidity. Other antidepressant drugs such as tricyclics and MAO inhibitors are not used in the treatment of GAD.

...More at Wikipedia 

Related Links:

• National Institute of Mental Health
• Mayo Clinic

Recent Hope Cube Blog Entries For General Anxiety Disorder (GAD)

• Panic Attacks Sun, April 27, 2008 - [view]
  Living with this for years. Still waiting for some relief from panic attacks. Anyone have any suggestions besides meds?
• Big pharma and a big problem Mon, September 17, 2007 - [view]
  Depression, has always been a big issue with me like I imagine it being a big issue with everyone else. Life is too simple, we work, drive our cars, go to school, all in hopes of reaching some goal, some shiny brass ring at the top of a big ugly pile of old furniture, splintered, and moldy. You have to climb this pile of junk in order to get to prize. For me it seems like my pile of junk smoothed out into, well just a big pile of nothing, I had to keep climbing, because I was too far up to turn around, and going forward just seemed pointless because I lost sight of my brass ring a long time ago. so I just kept slowly climbing, no challenge, no reward. I needed something to avert my attention to other things. I was depressed. I was going nowhere. So I called up the shrink, had myself eva...
• Losing my mind Mon, September 17, 2007 - [view]
  I'm young, 24 and active, with two small children. My Anxiety arrose from a combination of illness and life stress. I'm a military wife and we have gone through two deployments and although the soldiers are checked and treated for PTSD the spouses are ignored. No, we at home weren't in fear of our own dealth or subjected to first hand horrors of war, but we lived with real fear everyday of our loved ones being hurt or killed and we expose ourselves to the war more by focusing on it everyday. I found that the most helpfull tools for coping with GAD where natural. Things like breathing excersises and relaxation techniques help more than poisionus medications.