How Effective Is Sertraline for Anxiety?

Social phobia is a subtype of phobia. Phobia is originally called phobic neurosis and is a type of neurosis. The main manifestation is the excessive and irrational fear of some external object or situation. The patient knows that this fear reaction is excessive or irrational, but it still appears repeatedly and is difficult to control. Fear attacks are often accompanied by obvious anxiety and autonomic symptoms. Patients try to avoid objective things or situations that cause fear, or endure with fear, which affects their normal activities. Common phobia subtypes include square fear, social fear, and special phobia.

Social

The exact etiology and pathogenesis of social fear is not yet fully understood. Similar to other phobias, social fear is currently thought to be related to the following factors:

Social phobia aka

Social phobia psychotherapy

1. Behavioral therapy is the preferred method for treating phobias. Systemic desensitization therapy and exposure shock therapy have good effects on social phobia. The first principle is to eliminate the conditional connection between the object of fear and the anxiety and fear reaction; the second is to counteract the avoidance response. Many patients have learned how to avoid the objects and scenes that cause them to fear without affecting their daily social functions during the course of the disease ^[3] .

2. System desensitization is used more frequently, and it can be divided into real scene desensitization and imaging desensitization. The first stage is relaxation training. In the second stage, patients are asked to list the relevant social fear-causing situations according to the severity of the fear reaction, and then start from the situation that caused the weakest fear reaction, and place the patients one by one or imagine In these situations. At each step, the patient adapts, feels completely relaxed, and then moves on to the next more stressful situation until the strongest situation does not cause fear.

Social phobia medication

Drugs cannot simply eliminate the fear of patients, but drugs such as benzodiazepines and propranolol can alleviate the physical anxiety response caused by fear and reduce the autonomic nervous response. SSRIs such as paroxetine and sertraline are effective in the treatment of social anxiety disorders. The tricyclic antidepressants mipamin and clomipramine and the monoamine oxidase inhibitor moclobemide are also effective in treating phobias, but the adverse reactions of the drugs are limited application.

Other treatments for social phobia

Relaxation therapy, meditation, qigong, etc. can also help patients.