Therapy for anxiety Therapy for anxiety
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THE DIAGNOSIS OF ANXIETY DISORDERS.
Drawing the line between normal anxiety, syndromes of anxiety, and clinical anxiety is difficult and somewhat arbitrary. We have suggested that at least four groups of anxiety syndromes can be defined.
Although treatment should focus on the symptoms, we believe that it is important to make clinical
diagnoses, and we recommend that therapists use the DSM-III-R diagnostic system recently released (APA, 1987).
DSM-III-R is a necessary evil. It is necessary because it often determines reimbursement, helps with clinical formulation and treatment, and facilitates communication of scientific and clinical information.
The drawbacks of DSM-III-R are that it forces clinicians to classify patients into categories that only partially fit their complex problems; it makes assumptions not shared by many therapists (for instance, that mental health problems should be considered medical problems), and it gives undue emphasis to psychiatry over other mental health disciplines since psychiatrists were the ones who mainly developed and implemented the system.
There is no doubt that the classification of anxiety disorders in DSM-III has been a major factor in stimulating the flowering of anxiety disorder research that has occurred in the past five years.
